Par For The Course
by Tragediane
Summary: Kith and Kin's sequel. G decides his team needs to grow closer. He challenges them to go beyond their comfort zones, to do things they never thought they could or would. After their second game of golf, G finds someone in his home. He apprehends the guy and plans to take him to Arkady's house. However, something goes awry in his plans. Bromance: G and Sam. Densi not story's focus.
1. Teed Off

**Author's Notes:**

** Title:** Par For The Course

** Rating: T**

** Story Premise: **G decides his team needs to grow closer. He challenges them to go beyond their comfort zones and do things they never thought they could or would.

** Pairing Warning: **Kensi and Deeks, well, a little, but it's not the focus of the story.

**Darkfic Warning: **Possibly as always. It comes with the territory of my writing name.

NCIS: Los Angeles and its characters are owned by CBS and the producers of it. I do not own anything, but if I did I would torture G Callen more. I am grateful to CBS and the producers of NCIS: LA for their contribution to the world of entertainment.

My stories are a work of my imagination and I do _not_ ascribe them to official story canon. This is a work intended for entertainment outside the official storyline owned by CBS and the producers of NCIS:LA. I gain no profit from the creation and publication of this story.

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**Par For The Course**

**Teed Off**

**Chapter 1**

G squinted in the bright afternoon sun in spite of wearing sunglasses and an aqua blue visored cap pulled down over his eyes. He returned his focus to the grass at his feet and the equipment in his hands. G practiced for this moment it seemed like a bazillion times. Yet still he couldn't master it. At least he couldn't master it the way he desired to do it. He leaned over and swung the piece of equipment and stared after the small aqua ball as it flew through the air to his right. Darn. Not that way! After a shorter distance than he imagined, the aqua ball dropped to a well-manicured lawn and rolled for too long and right off an edge into a sand trap.

Giggles and boos erupted from a small audience behind him. G leaned over and pulled an aqua blue tee from the grass and walked back to his audience.

"I like us dressing the part of our ball's color. It helps me keep track of who's who," Sam said. "By the way, better luck next time," Sam said, strolling past him.

G watched his partner ready himself; placing a dark blue tee in the grass and giving a practice swing. The guy was muscled in all the wrong places for golf, but he pulled off the game well, usually. With the equipment in both hands, Sam took a hard swing at the ball as if it were a baseball and the golf club in his hands were a bat.

The ball traveled through the air further than G's had, but hung to his hard left. "Fore," Sam yelled. The dark blue ball sailed past their green onto the next and barely missed a man and a woman standing on a well-manicured, smooth lawn. It stopped a few inches away from a flag which marked the second hole on the nine hole golf course.

G roared with laughter. Deeks and Kensi joined him.

Sam straightened and glanced their way. He leaned over and picked up his tee off the grass and walked up to his team.

"I'll bet you teed off those people," G said, still laughing at his partner's complete lack of direction.

"Your turn," Sam said, eyeing Deeks. G noticed his partner's complete desire to ignore his jeers. Sam slid his club into a golf bag and slung the bag over his shoulder. "You can stop acting so smug. I'm one hole ahead of all of you." He chuckled at his own joke.

"You can't play that way," G said. "Just like before it counts as two strokes against you."

"This sucks big time," Sam said.

"I'll bet it does," Deeks said, walking past the two men to set up his first stroke of the game.

"Let see if you can do any better," Sam said, standing back and watching his team member get ready. "Last time you sucked worse than either one of us."

"I've practiced," Deeks said, after setting up the chartreuse tee and ball. Deeks adjusted his chartreuse baseball cap. He swung his golf club and completely missed the ball. Jeers from the crowd erupted and sailed over to him. "It was a practice run."

"You certain you don't need more practice," Kensi asked.

Deeks looked up from where he was hunched over his ball. "I was practicing."

"Yeah, right, Deeks," G said.

"One more excellent practice stroke like that and we'll need to teach you how to play big boy golf again," Sam said.

G watched the less muscular Deeks laugh and refocus on hitting the ball. Deeks swung again, this time hitting the ball square on. G watched it travel through the air.

"At least it's the straightest one so far," G said.

"And that means?" Kensi asked.

"It's straighter." The ball fell to the ground a few feet from the tee off. Deeks leaned over and picked up his tee. His team came over and glanced over Deeks' shoulders.

"Seriously, that's as far as you could get it?" G asked. "That's an embarrassment to our whole team."

Sam felt his team member's arm muscles. "You need to work out more, Deeks, that's your problem."

"Nope, his problem is he can't golf worth a…" Kensi said.

"Worth anything," Sam said. "Looks like you're the first stroke. Watch those divots."

"How many par is this hole?" Deeks asked, changing out his wood club for an all metal one.

"Not enough for you," Kensi said, laughing and patting him on the back. "Go easy on that grass, partner."

"What? I've never smoked."

She shook her head.

"Besides I wouldn't talk, Kensalina, yours landed in the water hazard."

She glared at him and punched him in the arm.

"Ouch." Deeks smiled. He aimed his club iron at his ball and swung it. A huge divot flew through the air with the now aerial ball.

"They're gonna make you pay for that one," Sam said. "You're gonna be reseeding their lawn by the time this game is over."

"At least my ball landed on the putting green."

"Whose putting green?" G asked. "You and Sam must've practiced together this week." He winked at his partner.

"Watch it. I'm gonna slug you." Sam made a face at G.

"I'm just saying."

"Luckily he didn't have to call 'fore' this time," Kensi said. She giggled.

"Very funny guys," Deeks said.

"That's three strokes for you," she said.

"Different strokes for different folks." Deeks picked up the divot and placed it back where it lifted out of the plush lawn.

Sam chuckled. "Ah Deeks, that phrase doesn't go with golfing."

Deeks slid his club into his golf bag and lifted the bag onto a shoulder. "Well, how about this?" He smiled and walked along side his team to the next player's ball.

"About what?" Kensi asked, pulling out a wedge and standing on the other side of the water hazard.

"Remember, you've got to add an extra for that one, Kensalina."

"You don't need to remind me." She swung her club. The golf ball lifted high in the air and landed on the other side of the putting green. It kept rolling off the edge into a sand trap, joining her team leader's ball. "Seriously? This game sucks."

"Nope, wait for it."

"I'm done waiting for your little quip," she said.

"This isn't just any little quip."

"All right Deeks, give it to us already before we throw you into that water hazard," Sam said, tilting his head toward the algae coated pond next to him.

"That's _par_ for the course." Deeks stepped back from his team before they could reach out and punch him in the arms.

"Now that's the best I've ever heard from you," Sam said.

"Agreed," G said.

They all laughed and strolled toward the next team member's ball.


	2. Challenges

**Thank you for reading. Thank you for the reviews.**

**Challenges**

**Chapter 2**

"Okay, Kens, you get to share your challenge first," G said, settling down at a table with a beer in his hand.

Kensi slid in next to him on a resin-coated, oak bench seat and placed her beer on the matching table. "I hoped we could skip this part."

"Come on, this is the main reason we decided to try golfing in the first place," he said. "It's a challenge to every one of us."

Deeks sat across from them and gulped down his beer. "Nothing like a celebratory drink after a great game."

"You're only saying that because you beat us all by ten under par," she said, nursing her beer.

Sam settled next to Deeks and across from his partner. "Well, he must've practiced without me. That's all I've got to say." Sam patted Deeks on his back. "Good job."

"Thanks," he said. "Honestly, I never practiced."

"Come on Kens," G said, eyeing her.

"Believe me when I say it, Deeks didn't have time to practice golfing," she said. "Okay, I invited my partner to an Indian restaurant and danced for him."

"Holy… seriously, Kens?" G asked.

"Yes, and she was actually good at it."

"But you're the physical type so what's the challenge in that?" Sam asked.

"As a kid I hated dance classes," she said. "I was uncoordinated."

"Not very coordinated? Come on Kens. Tell the truth," G said. He sipped his beer.

"I was clumsy with two left feet."

"What kind of dance?" Sam asked.

G watched his teammate's face brighten by two shades of pink. "Belly dancing," Kensi said.

G and Sam broke out in laughter.

Kensi squirmed on the bench seat. "Hey, we're supposed to be supportive of each other."

"I for one would've loved to see that," G said. "Seriously, belly dancing, I'd never think you'd go that far."

"Callen!"

G held up his hands. "Peace. My apologies."

"You'd better. Can't wait to hear about your adventures."

"And Deeks?" Sam asked.

"I took a gourmet cooking class and served Kensalina a five-course dinner."

"Now there something I'd like to experience first hand," Sam said.

"It actually tasted good," Kensi said.

"Thank you," Deeks said. "And now for your challenges."

Two rustic artichoke and chicken pizzas were placed on their table's center. A stack of white ceramic plates were added to the oak table. G, Sam, Kensi, and Deeks grabbed a slice each and started chowing down.

After Sam's second piece he said, "I took spelunking lessons and took G on an adventure."

"Spelunking?" Kensi asked.

"Cave exploring for big boys," G said.

"That's a huge stretch Sam, nice one," Deeks said.

"Unfortunately I couldn't stop hyperventilating," Sam said, looking down at the table.

Deeks patted him on the back. "Give it a couple of more times and you'll be an expert."

"And G?" Kensi asked.

"I allowed myself to be vulnerable during the last ops."

"You got injured?" Deeks asked.

"It was a little scratch," G said.

"Seriously, man, that was no little scratch," Sam said, turning his attention to his partner and eyeing him, "he got stabbed in the arm."

"With a knife?" Deeks asked.

G picked at the artichoke pieces on his slice of pizza. "Yeah, it was a knife."

"I _hate_ when it's a knife," Kensi said.

G sighed and pushed up his long sleeve, dark teal t-shirt, exposing his bandaged arm. A little blood had seeped through the white gauze.

"That looks as if it needs attention," she said.

"If I do anything physical…"

"Like golfing, G?"

"Okay, I should've told you guys I wanted to opt out this time," he said. "But I wanted to follow through with playing because I'm the team leader."

"Next time Callen, tell us," Deeks said.

"What do you want Deeks?" G picked up the slice of pizza and winked at him. He said, "It's about life and that's par for the course."

Deeks roared with laughter.

G ate several bites of pizza before depositing the unfinished slice on his plate. "Okay, who's in for another week of challenges?" He stuck his hand in the air over the solid oak table's center.

Deeks, Kensi, and Sam covered their team leader's hand.

"Challenge number two!" They all shouted.

**#**

Sam drove his black, sleek Challenger toward G's home.

"That went quite well for our second game of golf," G said.

"Deeks is doing better than all of us put together."

"Maybe a natural gift," G said.

Sam parked on the street outside G's house.

G opened the door and paused. "About that spelunking…"

"I'll tell them next time we play golf."

"I think you need to divulge your secret before that time." G climbed out of the car, shut the door, and leaned over the open car window. "It's only fair that they know you didn't quite follow through with your end of the deal."

Sam stared out the front window. "I hate enclosed spaces."

"Just as much as I hate being vulnerable."

"How about needles, G, huh? Don't you hate them even more?"

"Okay, yeah, I hate needles, but doesn't everyone hate needles?"

"Not as much as you."

"Okay, my challenge is to not react to a needle no matter where it's going." G sighed and straightened.

"That I've got to see."

"And yours?" G rapped his fingers on the Challenger's roof.

"Repeat my spelunking adventure and really follow through this time," Sam said. "I'll pick you up for work tomorrow morning, 7 AM sharp."

"Okay." G strode up the walkway to his house, stooped by the front door, and grabbed the keys from under a fake rock. Before he could put the key in the door he heard a sound coming from inside his house. G backed away from the front door and drew his weapon. He took out his cellphone and autodialed Sam. G whispered into the cellphone, "Someone's in my house."

"Stay outside it until I get back there. Two minutes out. Seriously, G, follow my orders."

"Who's the boss on an ops?"

"Who's the first one in the door?" Sam asked.

"You've got a point." He shut down the cellphone and edged around the corner of his house, scanning the yard, the house, and walkway in front of him. The backdoor to his home was wide open. An involuntary shudder shot up his spine. G stepped toward the open door and peered around the corner, attempting to see his intruder.

He stared into the barrel of a shot gun pointed at his face.

"Put your weapon down or I'll shoot your damned head off," the man with a blue, neoprene ski mask said.

G raised his hands in the air.

The man stepped forward and shouted, "I said put it down!"

G kept his eye on the man who was about his height and build and lowered his Sig SAUR P229 to the ground. He wondered if he could tackle the guy without getting shot. As usual, he was sizing up the situation as if he were on an ops. One thing he understood for certain, the moment his gun touched the ground he was a deadman because this was no friendly intruder. G made his decision. He lunged for the man, tackling him to the ground while keeping control of his own weapon. After wrestling the man and gaining the upper hand, he knocked wind out of him, sending the man's shot gun into the air and sailing across the kitchen floor. G cocked the hammer on his gun and pointed it at the man's head. "Take off your ski mask!"

The man slowly removed the tight fitting neoprene mask, revealing his identity.

G's jaw slacked open. "Was this Arkady Kolcheck's idea or yours?"

"He wanted me to look for something in your house," the blond haired man said, speaking with a thick Russian accent.

"Okay, just as usual, he can't just call me on the phone?" G climbed to his feet, keeping his gun trained on his intruder. "Get up. We're about to take a little trip." The guy was one of Arkady's moles who did his dirty work for him. "Turn around tough guy. Hands behind your back." G holstered his weapon and slapped a set of handcuffs around the man's wrists. "Since when is Arkady using sawed off shot guns?"

"Doesn't work," the man said.

"Seriously, you brought a broken shot gun to a gun fight?" G chuckled.

"I see you've apprehended your intruder," Sam said, stepping beside his partner.

G startled and flipped on his heels to face Sam. "Next time…"

"About next time, you were supposed to wait for me."

"Yeah, I was trying to see if the guy had any needles." G smirked. "I'm taking my unsub back to his leader. You want to come along?"

"Nope," Sam said, "I'm wanted at home by my family."

"Party pooper."

"Have fun and keep me informed." Sam holstered his gun and left the house.

"Okay tough guy, with a non-functioning weapon, let's go." He pushed the guy toward the weapon and retrieved it. G guided the mole to his black Mercedes sedan and sat him in the front seat. "Do I need further restraints?"

"No."

G tossed the shot gun onto the backseat. "Good, I didn't want to put you in the trunk like I did with the last guy Arkady sent here," G said, settling down in the driver's seat and buckling his seatbelt.

Before G could back out of his driveway, a needle pierced the skin on his neck. Part of him wanted to react to it and the other part of him wanted to be complacent as he had promised Sam he would. But before he decided on the course of action he should take, G started to lose a sense of time and space. He slumped forward, his forehead resting on the steering wheel.

An unknown amount of time later, G awakened in the backseat of a vehicle parked in his driveway. He took the usual inventory of his body; ankles zip tied, hands free, and head feeling as if it were a golf ball being teed off again and again. G needed to remember one thing, that no matter what, needles were painful and reacting to them was inevitable. He listened to voices coming from front seat. His head still groggy from whatever drug they gave him, G pulled out his cellphone and began filming his two captors. Sandwiched between two videos, he snapped pictures of them, well, as much as he could view of them in their black neoprene ski masks. _Note to self: Get some neoprene ski masks for an ops._ G decided that questions were necessary to obtain intel for his team should he not be able to escape. With his head pounding from that infernal drug in his bloodstream, G pressed onward and asked the most annoying questions, ones which were on the unusual side of normal. He hoped his team and Sam got the messages.


	3. Gone

**Thank you for your patience. Here's the next chapter. Thank you for the reviews.**

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**Gone**

**Chapter 3**

Sam stopped by on Monday morning to pick G up for work. He knocked on the back door several times before inserting the key G had given him. Sam stepped inside the semi-dark room and flipped on the light switch. His jaw dropped. From where he stood the whole house had been turned over. Every piece of furniture, every lamp, every paper… well… G didn't have much furniture even after three years of living there. Nothing in the house remained in an upright position. All the dishes and glasses in the kitchen cupboards were smashed to pieces on the Spanish tiled floor.

"G!" Sam withdrew his weapon and searched the house, checking each room for a sign of his partner. He took out his cellphone and autodialed his supervisor. "Hetty," Sam said, breathless from mostly stress something which rarely bothered him. He stopped outside G's bedroom and edged into the room.

"Yes, Mr. Hanna."

Her soothing voice calmed him, at least for a moment. "G call you?" Sam entered the bathroom. Everything was the same; every item in every cupboard including all the towels were strewn about on the tiled bathroom floor.

"No."

His heart rate increased. Sweat beaded up on the forehead and trickled down his face, even with the air conditioner running at a higher setting than G normally set it. His dark brown skin shined with the moisture collecting on it.

"Mr. Hanna?"

"He's gone… send our team to his house… right now… ASAP." He shut off his cellphone and slumped to the bathroom floor. _If only I gone with him last night. _He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

Within fifteen minutes his team arrived at the house.

Deeks came over to Sam's side and lowered his voice as if he were telling him a secret no one else should hear, "We'll find him."

"Thank you." Sam climbed to his feet and left the bathroom. He reentered the kitchen and traced the steps he thought his partner would take out to his car. In the driveway, Sam crouched low and examined what appeared to be small drops of blood.

"Find something," Kensi said, crouching beside him. She reached into a pocket and pulled out an evidence bag which contained a razor blade. Kensi scraped the small drops of dried blood into the evidence bag and deposited the razor blade into it as well. She straightened and eyed her partner as he approached her.

Sam examined the area around the small drops of blood. "Got another bag?" He glanced up at Kensi.

She handed him a second bag.

"Tweezers?"

Kensi rummaged through the evidence bags in her hand for one.

Deeks pulled one out of the evidence bag in his hands and offered it to Sam.

Sam opened the bag and deposited several small particles into it. He sealed the bag and handed it Deeks along with the tweezers.

"We'll get this to the lab ASAP," Deeks said.

"Hetty say anything… hi Hetty," Sam said, seeing her walk up to the three of them.

"Walk with me, Mr. Hanna."

He followed her over to a spot on the front lawn and folded his arms.

Hetty lowered her voice, "What's going on here?"

"The short of it, I'm not certain," he said, watching his team scour the driveway from more clues. "The long of it?" Sam sighed. "Last night after our golf game G found an intruder in his home."

"Is that so?"

He understood what she wanted. Intel. Spill it now. "One of Arkady's messengers, telling G he wanted to see him," Sam said. "G handled that situation fine. When I left he was taking the handcuffed man to Arkady's house. G invited me along and I declined his offer because I prior commitments."

"What did you find?"

"Small specks of dried blood on the driveway and some hairs. Looked as if they were animal hairs not human. And that's all."

"Except the house," Hetty said, interlacing her fingers.

"The house wasn't like that when I came here last night."

"No?"

"Arkady's intruder didn't make a mess."

"This means, Mr. Hanna, that we've got ourselves a criminal act and a kidnapping of a federal agent by an unsub."

"I'm well aware of the situation," he said, "and I blame myself for not going with him to Arkady's house."

"There's no blame to place on yourself, Mr. Hanna."

"I'm taking full responsibility for—"

"Absolutely not. I need your head clear and focused," Hetty said, stepping closer to him. "I need you 100%. Understood?"

All he thought about was his supervisor sounding like a mother. Sam needed to wipe that image from his mind, quick. He kept his attention on his team in the distance. Kensi pointed to the driveway and then the street. Sam took the opportunity to evade and escape, rushing over to her side, needing to distance himself from Hetty and that mothering. "Anything?"

"See this," she said, pointing to the marks. "They're faint, but they're something." Kensi snapped several pictures of the tire marks with her cellphone. "Are you getting these Eric? Someone left in a hurry enough to mark the driveway."

"All six of them," Eric said from the OPS center at NCIS Headquarters.

Kensi studied the marks further and hurried down the driveway to the street. "Can someone move this car?" She crouched low to the ground. "Never mind." Kensi flattened onto her stomach and crawled under the car. "Tweezers and an evidence bag. Make that two evidence bags."

Sam joined her on the asphalt street still warmed from yesterday's extra warm summer day. Before she could bag it, Sam grabbed G's cellphone with his gloved hand.

"Sam!"

He scooted out from under the car and in the daylight saw the reason for her concern. Dried and coagulated blood covered it.

Kensi held open the evidence bag.

Reluctantly, Sam deposited it into the bag. He removed his gloves and placed them in another evidence bag that Deeks handed him. Sam climbed to his feet and helped Kensi stand.

"We don't know what this means," Deeks said, trying to reassure them both.

"I know you mean well, but this is an ominous sign," Sam said. "Get everything to the lab, ASAP."

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**#**

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In the OPS center at NCIS Headquarters, the team poured over the forensic results, searching for clues to their team leader's disappearance. The light table's top was spread with every bit of evidence they had gathered from G's house.

"Something's missing," Sam said.

"Such as?" Deeks asked.

"Where are the photos of the tire marks?"

"Sending them over to the table now," Nell said.

"Thanks." Sam studied them which wasn't his area of expertise. He glanced across the light table at Kensi and eyed her.

"I'm getting the communique," she said, dragging the photos down to her end of the table. Kensi enlarged each one with her thumb and fingers. She placed them side by side at one end of the huge light table. "Okay, two different, no, three different tire tracks. That's what I saw at the scene and that mystified me unless of course that someone besides the intruder, Arkady's mole, and Callen had pulled into the driveway."

"Searching databanks for car tires," Eric said. "Found matches and I'm sending the intel over to the light table."

Sam brought the intel over in front of him. "A Mercedes, G's car, a Ferrari with an unknown owner, and a Hummer with an unknown owner."

"Scanning surveillance cameras within five blocks of Callen's house," Nell said.

"Try a wider search," Kensi said.

"Ten?" Nell asked.

"At least ten," Sam said, "or more."

"Pulling up owners of Hummers and Ferraris," Eric said. "Arkady doesn't own either one of those cars."

"What about this?" Deeks asked. "What if the Mercedes wasn't Callen's?"

"That's a good question," Sam said. "No leaf unturned."

"I'm on it, Sam," Eric said.

Hetty entered the OPS Center wearing her black pants suit with thin gray stripes. She came over to the light table and watched her team working. "Find anything important yet?"

"Possibly three visitors to G's house, if we don't include his Mercedes in the cars which accessed the driveway," Sam said. He thought through all of their evidence and sighed. "We missed one thing, G's cellphone."

"I've got it," Eric said, "but I wasn't certain any of you wanted to see it."

"Give it to us," Kensi said.

"Yes, we're ready," Deeks said.

"No one is ever ready for this kind of intel," Eric said, placing photo after photo on the high definition screen before the team.

Their jaws slacked open.

Even Hetty's jaw slacked open.

"Any audio to go with those videos?" Sam asked.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—"

"Eric!" Sam admonished him.

Eric piped in the audio and paired it with two videos Callen had managed to take during his kidnapping.

Again, everyone's jaws slacked open.

What Sam saw and heard on the screen shocked him, but made perfect sense at the same time. G goaded his two kidnappers to gain intel from them and that resulted in him getting punched in the face numerous times. His actions answered the question about the coagulated blood on the cellphone. The very last part of the video showed G tossing his cellphone out the car window. Smart man. "Send those photos to the light table. Wait a minute, go back in the last video to where G tosses the cellphone out the window. See that?" It was a partial view of the car G was riding in.

Eric caught the image and created a photo. "I'll get on this right away."

"I've run facial recognition and have come up with absolutely nothing," Eric said. "There's not much of a face to go on with those neoprene ski masks. You want the videos?"

"Maybe later, thanks, the pictures of these men are the most important." Sam flipped on his heels and faced the light table again. "Now who are these men that's the million dollar question." He thought back to the videos again and changed his mind. "Okay Eric, send them to the table." One thing about those questions was odd. No, everything about those questions was off. What was G trying to obtain? The men never answered him, well, at least in the normal manner in which one would expect. Instead they punched G in the face. Was that the result his partner wanted? None of this made the least bit of sense. Sam wondered if they had drugged his partner, but even in the face of torture G never acted so strangely. These images haunted Sam.

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_**Thank you for reading.**_


	4. Missing

**Thank you for the reviews and for reading. Here's the next chapter.**

* * *

**Missing**

**Chapter 4**

Sam loathed working any case without his partner and there were many ops he endured with the rest of his team. One thing for certain, they had grown together as a tightly knit team and learned to work well together.

As the months passed without any new clues about G's disappearance, Sam slumped into a deeper depression about his decision on that fateful day after their golf game. _If only…_ he repeated to himself all too often. Everyday after work, Sam stopped at G's home and took care of things; watering the single plant on the front porch, bringing in the mail which was now piled high in six bins, one for each month, in the third bedroom, and searching the house, yard, and garage for clues.

Sam entered the garage and stopped just inside it and froze. As quietly as possible, he withdrew his weapon and edged toward the new addition to the garage's cement floor; a blanket covered form, rather a blanketed breathing form.

"Come out from under the blanket, real slow," Sam said, keeping his weapon aimed at the intruder's head.

The intruder under the blanket stayed still.

"Did you hear me? Pull the blanket down, now!" Sam stepped closer to blanketed form and nudged it with his foot. "I've got a gun aimed at your head. Real slow, reveal yourself."

Still no movement occurred from under the blanket.

Sam leaned over the breathing form and grabbed the blanket and yanked it off the intruder's head, exposing a nearly unrecognizable blood-encrusted head.

"G!"

Sam autodialed Hetty and told her to send an ambulance to G's place, and then he shut off his cellphone. He crouched beside G's unresponsive body. As much as he didn't enjoy the prospect of taking photos of his unconscious partner, he decided it was best for the investigation. Sam pulled the blanket off his partner to expose his entire body. His jaw slacked open. G's shirt was in shreds and bloodied, his back was covered with blood. Long horizontal welts peppered G's back and chest. Sam leaned closer and felt his partner's skin, too cool to the touch. His jeans were ripped and shredded. It appeared that G had lost a considerable amount of weight with all of his ribs showing from collar bone to just below the sternum.

At the risk of prolonged exposure to the colder than normal winter air, Sam quickly snapped pictures of G's body. He finished the upper half, covered it, and then started taking photos of the lower half. No shoes. No socks. G's feet had a bluish tinge to them. Not good. And the same welts peppered the bottom of his feet. Sam covered G again and tucked the blanket under and around his partner's cold feet.

Sam exited the garage and walked toward the front of G's house to wait for the ambulance and his team.

He didn't have long to wait before everyone pulled up at once to the curb.

"Where is he?" Kensi asked, crossing the space between the curb and Sam, her breaths coming fast and hard.

"You need to be prepared for—"

"Don't do this to us," Deeks said, coming along side his partner.

"He's in the garage under a blanket." Sam led the way to the garage and stopped just inside the doorway, allowing the paramedics and his team to enter.

The paramedics removed the blanket and prepared the patient for transport.

Kensi covered her mouth and stared at her team leader's now exposed beaten and bloodied body.

Deeks stood close to Kensi, sliding his arm around her waist.

The paramedics wrapped G's body in an emergency warming blanket and lifted him onto a gurney. "UCLA," one of them said, pushing the gurney past Kensi, Deeks, and Sam.

The team followed the paramedics to the front yard.

"I'm going with him," Sam said, "here's the keys to my car." He handed them to Deeks. It wasn't the first time in the last six months he'd given his keys to Deeks. He hated when anyone, including his partner, drove his Challenger, yet there were days he was close to non-functioning and those days he allowed Deeks to take the wheel. Sam promised himself that he would allow G to drive more often once he recovered from whatever had happened to him. He climbed into the back of the ambulance and watched the paramedics work on his partner.

G's feet were wrapped in warmed booties. A specially warmed knit cap covered G's head and more blankets were laid on his body. Heated fluids were infused into G's veins.

After they were finished, Sam sat closer and grasped G's hand, holding it tight in his.

* * *

**#**

* * *

Sam paced the floor outside the Intensive Care Unit [ICU], waiting for the nurses to finish their duties and leave G's room. After he slipped back inside, Sam sat close to his partner and held his hand. Three weeks passed since discovering G in the garage and his partner hadn't awakened. Furthermore, the doctors had protected his partner's health by placing him in a drug induced coma for two weeks, stating G's injuries were too extensive for him to remain conscious and endure the pain. Now it was a waiting game. Sam spent every waking hour sitting next to his partner, waiting for him to awaken from his deep slumber. The rest of the time he spent sleeping on the window seat in G's ICU room. He wondered if G would ever be the partner he was before this ordeal and most of all he wondered who did this to his partner. Sam closed his eyes just as he had numerous times while staying with G.

Then he felt it for the first time, G shuddered. Sam opened his eyes and studied his partner's face and body.

G shuddered again and his eyes fluttered open.

Sam felt intense pressure on his hand and pulled his hand from his partner's grip.

"Don't let go," G said, his voice raspy and weak.

Sam glommed onto G's hand and held it close to his chest. "Glad you're awake."

"Water."

"Ice." Sam poured several ice cubes into a cup and fed one to his partner.

G choked on the first ice cube and spit out the remaining pieces.

Sam raised the head of the bed slightly and offered another ice cube to his partner.

This time G offered a hand and placed the cube of ice in his own mouth. He closed his eyes. "Too tired to do this."

"Then allow me to help you," Sam said. "Ready for another ice cube?"

G opened his eyes again and nodded.

Sam popped an ice cube into G's open mouth.

"How long?" G mouthed.

"Here in the ICU?"

"Yes."

"Three weeks."

"Seems as if I've been gone for six months." G opened his mouth for another ice cube.

"You have been." Sam started to place another cube of ice on his partner's tongue.

G pulled away at the last second and stared into Sam's eyes. "Six?"

"Now more than six."

"I don't remember… any of it."

"You don't remember what happened to you?" Sam asked, placing the ice cube back into the cup and setting the cup on the bedside table.

"I remember one thing; needles hurt no matter what."

Sam saw a faint smile on his partner's face. "Okay, I'll buy that." The faint smile assured him that G would return to his duties at NCIS someday. That's all he needed right now. Sam smiled back at his partner.

"And I hate needles… still."

"So your memory is intact until that point in time when you experienced a needle?"

"Yes."

"And that happened when?"

"I was about to back down the driveway to head toward Arkady's house," G said. "And there's something distant and foggy about trying to send you a message, one you obviously didn't get."

Sam cocked his head sideways. "A message? How?"

"The videos and pictures, contained messages…" G sighed. "Can't think about it right now. It's giving me a headache."

"Okay, any more ice cubes?"

"No, enough for now." G closed his eyes again.

Within minutes Sam heard his partner snoring. He raised the head of bed some more and the snoring stopped.

Sam stepped away from G's bed and faced the only window. It was the first sunny day since G had been hospitalized. Sam hoped it too was a good sign. He autodialed Hetty on his cellphone and kept his voice lowered to a whisper, "G's awake and talking about sending a message to me through the videos and photos."

"I'll get those sent to your laptop ASAP," Hetty said, "maybe the two of you can figure this out and solve the case. Glad to hear Mr. Callen is awake and talking."

"He's got no memory beyond sending messages to me through the videos and photos."

"Amnesia for torture he endured and the pain it caused," she said. "Quite understandable."

Sam turned around and sat on the window seat. He opened his laptop computer. "I received the videos and photos."

"Let him know we're looking forward to the day he comes back to active duty at NCIS," Hetty said. "Take care of him."

Sam ended the call and laid his cellphone on the bedside table next to his laptop computer. He perused the pictures first. Nothing appeared to contain a message at least to him. If G sent something it had to be encoded or maybe it referred to something they had experienced together. He now looked forward to the moment G awakened again and they could study the photos together. Sam closed his laptop and slumped against the cushions.

He closed his eyes and rubbed them with both hands. In that moment, Sam remembered something he saw in one of the photos. Sam jotted it down on a piece of paper. G had taken a picture of the man's ski mask, making certain he focussed on the name of the manufacturer on the mask. Now he was curious. Sam leaned forward and opened his laptop computer. He started a search for that name on the internet.


	5. Infiltrates

**Thank you for the reviews and your patience. Feeling better everyday. Never knew it would take this long to recover.**

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**Infiltrates**

**Chapter 5**

Three days after he had awakened, G perused the pictures and videos in Sam's computer and pointed out the clues he had left for him.

Sam stared at the subtle, but definite clues. "I don't know how we missed these."

"They were for your eyes only, that's why, I thought you'd get them," G said, pushing the laptop over to his partner. "I think I need a break." G lowered the head of his hospital bed. "Too much thinking gives me a headache."

"I've got one question for you."

"I think I can manage one question with my eyes closed."

"What were those people looking for in your house?"

"What do you mean?"

"Everything in your house was overturned," Sam said. "Look at these pictures." He placed the computer back on G's lap.

G opened his eyes and scanned through photo after photo of his destroyed home. "Who did this?"

"Certainly not Arkady's mole. Don't you remember at least that part?"

The odd look Sam had given him didn't go unnoticed. "I don't remember much about what my house looked like. I just remember Arkady's mole in my house and my plan to take him to Arkady's house. That's it."

"Did he ever tell you what he wanted?"

"Nope."

Sam took the laptop back and set it on the bedside table.

"Did you ever find him?" G asked, closing his eyes again.

"Nope," Sam said, putting away the laptop. "Hetty says she wants a word with you when we're finished. I'll go tell her you're ready."

As soon as Sam left the ICU room, G released a long sigh. _One down, one to go._ When Hetty stepped inside the room, G opened his eyes and raised the head of the bed.

"Mr. Callen," Hetty said, sitting down on the chair next to the bed. She wore one of her not-so-subtle, bright red suit pants. "Mr. Hanna tells me you don't remember much, but the clues you sent via the photos."

"Sorry, there's nothing to tell you."

"Maybe some time is needed, and it'll all come back to you."

"I don't believe there's anything to come back to me," G said. She too gave him an odd look. It made him wonder if he disclosed something in one of his many nightmares. Those darned things had started again, and he had little awareness of their content.

"They're releasing you this afternoon," Hetty said, leaning forward in the chair. "How do you feel about that?"

"I think I can handle it."

"Let's us know if you need any help around the house," she said, standing. "Recovery can be draining. If you remember anything which happened, please keep a running track of it."

"I will Hetty."

She left the room.

A few minutes later Sam returned with a nurse. "Looks like they're letting you go home."

"So I heard."

The nurse said, "Here's your discharge orders. The only thing of note is to use a cane if you feel unsteady on your feet. Otherwise you're able to resume all activities of daily living in your home. No heavy physical work until after you see your family doctor and he gives his approval. No working until cleared with your supervisor."

G read the discharge orders and signed them.

The nurse took them and left.

Sam laid some clothes on the foot of the bed. "You need help?"

"I think I can manage, but I'll call you if I do."

Sam left the room.

G stretched and yawned. _Three down._ He lowered the bed and then slid over to one side. Upon standing, he grabbed the handrail and steadied himself. The same dizziness that plagued him each time he got up to go to the bathroom was still there. He wondered again what his diagnosis was. As per usual he'd request a copy of his medical records and file them away, never looking at a thing. He wanted to keep his distance from anything, especially medical, when it involved needles. G dressed in the clothes Sam had laid out for him. Sweats. Perfect. That's about all he could think of wearing against the still sore and healing skin all over his body. With each step he took, the bottom of his feet felt as if they were on fire. He wondered what happened to them, but decided again against reading his medical records.

After dressing, G sat on the window seat and wondered where his shoes were.

Sam entered the room with a wheelchair and a pair of slippers. He said, "I thought you'd appreciate something softer on those feet." He crouched and placed them on his partner's feet.

G winced as Sam put each one on him. _Maybe I need to read those medical records._

"Your chariot awaits." Sam straightened and helped G into the wheelchair.

The nurse came into the room with a copy of the sign discharge orders and handed it to her patient.

"I'll need a copy of the medical records sent to my home," G said.

"Already prepared for you, Mr. Callen," she said, turning to leave.

Sam pushed the wheelchair out of the room and down two long corridors to an elevator.

Once out in the parking lot, Sam helped his partner into the Challenger. "We good?" he asked.

"Yeah, except for a cane."

"Handled already," he said, "I dropped one off at your home yesterday."

"Thanks." G reached over to close the door.

Sam climbed into the driver's seat. "I've changed my policy on who drives my car."

"You mean since I was gone."

"Yeah, I allowed Deeks to drive it and soon it'll be your turn."

"I hope you'll wait until after I recover from this ordeal," G said, rolling down the window and breathing in the fresh, crisp winter day's air. "It's good to be out of the hospital." He reclined his seat and closed his eyes, allowing the cool breezes to waft over his face and arms.

"Want anything to eat before I drop you off?" Sam asked.

G startled awake, surprised he'd drifted off to sleep so fast. "No, I'm good."

"I stocked your refrigerator yesterday."

"You didn't need to."

"As per Hetty's orders," Sam said, "it wasn't my idea."

"And my house?"

"Spotless."

"And, well, we're here, and you can check it all out," Sam said, parking in the driveway.

"Would you mind parking on the street?" G asked, shuddering from a fleeting flashback of that day something happened.

"No problem." Sam backed down the driveway and started to park on the street.

"Stop the car!"

"Easy, man."

"I can't do this." Before Sam finished parking at the curb, G bailed out of the car and nearly face planted on the grass. He half limped and half hobbled to the front door.

"Hey, wait up," Sam said, finally catching up with his partner. "You had a flashback?"

"Something like that. Don't ever park in the driveway again." G rummaged through the planter next to the door to find his keys.

Sam held them up in his hand.

G took them and opened his door.

His jaw dropped open.

He had furniture.

"Who picked it?"

"Hetty. This was all her idea. Believe me, I told her to leave well enough alone but she insisted—"

"It's perfect." The living room was decorated with a heavy dark brown leather sofa and matching recliner with an ottoman. G spied a beautiful gentlemen's cane in a metal can by the front door. He grabbed it and hobbled down the hallway. G stopped in the doorway to his bedroom and admired his supervisor's decorating job. A bed. He longed for one, but never could decide on anything. The heavy, mahogany four poster bed had the look he wanted. He guessed Hetty was tired of the sleeping roll on the closet floor.

"Looks nicer than your whatcha-ma-call-it," Sam said, standing beside his partner.

"Probably feels nicer too since my body hurts so danged much."

"She no doubt knew that."

No doubt. G hoped his supervisor hadn't redecorated every single room in his home. He hobbled down the hallway to the two guest rooms and noticed nothing had been touched in either one of them, except a simple desk and chair had been added to the last room. He wanted to check out the chair more closely, but decided to wait until Sam was gone and he was alone. Knowing Hetty, she purchased the most deluxe model for his aching body. G checked in the hall bathroom. Darn that woman, all new fixtures plus a higher toilet. Well, he absolutely needed the higher toilet since his… well, incident. He hated to say the other word, the real one that happened. G hobbled into his bedroom and checked the ensuite bathroom.

His jaw dropped open.

Hetty had changed the entire configuration. The same higher toilet as the guest bathroom and a zero edge, walk-in shower with a high enough seat and numerous safety bars. G sighed. All his favorite colors too; aqua tile throughout with deep blue accents. Hetty had outdone herself for certain. With all the fancy bells and whistles any shower makeover should have, G looked forward to a long, hot shower in it.

Sam stood in the doorway watching his partner. "Meet with your approval?"

"Did she do it all?"

"Her and about twenty government contractors," he said. "She asked the hospital what specs were needed for your discharge."

"I never once expected to find all of this in my house." G entered the bedroom and sat on the new bed. "Feels good. I'm tired."

"I can see that," Sam said. "Anything else you need? Here's the burn phone Hetty wanted you to have."

"A burn phone?"

"Yeah, she wants you safe."

"I don't know if those people will come here again," G said.

"Nonetheless, she wants you to use only burn phones, a new one each day."

"That's got to be expensive."

"Required by Hetty and Vance and Granger."

"That's a mouthful," G said, reclining on the bed and placing the cane next to him.

"And I'll place this encrypted laptop on your desk in the guest room."

G sat up. "Wait, encrypted?"

"Yeah, she's got paranoia."

"That's paranoia beyond paranoia," G said.

"Well, I for one tend to agree with her until we discover who's behind your—"

"Don't say that word… I can't handle it, okay? Man, just don't say it." G stared at his cane.

"Like you couldn't handle me parking in the driveway?"

"Yeah, just like that." G shuddered and laid against the softest pillows he'd ever felt in his whole life.

"Hetty upgraded your security as well."

G shot up again. "What? The security too?"

"Vance suggested it and you know what happens when he hints at something."

"It gets done," G said, his voice sounding even distant to himself. "Any other upgrades I need to know about?"

"Do a little exploring of your home and you'll find them," Sam said.

"I'll take that computer in here."

Sam crossed the room and placed it on a mahogany night stand along with all its accessories. "It's fully charged and ready to go. Okay, I'm off. You've got my cellphone number memorized still?"

"Yeah, I think so, at least that memory is intact."

"I'll lock the door and set your alarms on the way out." Sam left the bedroom.

G heard him in the distance. He listened to the sounds of the alarm being set, the beeps and other tones as buttons were pushed. And then all was quiet, too quiet. His mind started to zero in on his breathing. He tried to keep it calm and steady, but found his heart starting to race and his breathing sped up. As the tension in his body rose, G focused harder on the quietness of his home, and the distant distinct beep of an advanced alarm system.

After a short time he had enough and positioned himself on the bedside. He took his cane and explored the rest of his house. In the kitchen he found a new refrigerator stocked with food and yet he had no appetite.

Pictures infiltrated the once starkness of his mind, bringing G images from one of the most frightening days of his life. He attempted to push everything away, but now being alone in his home the images became brighter and clearer. G steadied himself by grasping the countertop at the sink. Here was where he needed grab bars. Something had occurred in the kitchen and yet the images passed so fast before his mind that he couldn't grasp onto a single one. Dizziness awakened in his body again, threatening to send him crashing to the floor.

He needed two canes not one.

G glommed onto anything he could find as he made his way back to the bedroom. In the hallway outside his room, he stopped and panted, pressing down memory after memory of that day over six months ago. G stepped forward and grabbed one of the posts on the bed. Thank goodness Hetty's tastes in furniture matched his desire to remain upright instead of plastered face first on the oak floors. The oak floors. The stripped, stained, and polished oak floors. G flashed on something about oak floors and passwords and a metal box. He pulled himself onto the bed and collapsed in the center.


	6. Odd Memories

_**Thank you for reading my stories and the wonderful reviews.**_

_**Here's the next chapter...**_

* * *

**Odd Memories**

**Chapter 7**

After sleeping over twenty-eight hours straight, it was five in the evening on the second day home when G sat on his new recliner in the living room with the hospital's medical records on his lap. He was about to perform something for the first time in his life. G turned the first page and read the doctors' detailed summary of his condition which had been prepared by the nurses' initial assessment. He stared at the page, unable to take in anything past the first paragraph, well, actually the first sentence grabbed him as if it were the first line of a great thriller novel, except this was about his own life.

_Patient presents with welts over eighty percent of his body and welts repeat on the bottoms of his feet._

G tossed the report onto the sofa and took off his right slipper. He attempted to lift his leg onto his knee, but was too weak to perform the move without yanking his sweat pants and lifting his leg onto his other leg. G stared at the deep marks on the bottom of his foot. _It is no wonder I can barely stand on my feet. _He gently touched one of the marks and stifled a scream. His whole body stiffened and shuddered at once. How in the—

A sudden flash of memory showed a man beating him with a rod as if his body and feet were a sheet needing the dust removed from them.

G jerked hard, hoping to dislodge the memory from his vision. Just as fast as it appeared the memory disappeared, but left him feeling shaken to the core. He wanted the warmth of the new shower Hetty had installed in his master bathroom. G stood and steadied his wobbly body and feet with the recliner's armrest and his cane. _Note to self: ask Sam for a walker._ He limped down the hallway and into the bedroom. G perused his chest of drawers he now found filling up the extra room in his closet. His bed roll was stashed in a corner on the closet's floor. He found a clean set of sweats and closed the drawer and the closet. G clumsily maneuvered his way to his bathroom. He felt as if he were a man wearing an armored suit, lacking the ease to move like he had joints which functioned.

Once inside the bathroom he placed his clothes on a bench and sat on another one to remove his clothes. Beside him he noticed a wall control for heated floors. He turned the heat up to the highest setting and waited on the bench until his feet felt warm. Inside the new shower, G gingerly sat on the shower seat. Every muscle in his whole body ached as if he had worked out in the gym for hours. _Must be body memories. _He turned on the shower and selected a handheld shower head. G placed it next to him on the seat, planning to use it for rinsing off his body. Three shower heads sprayed gentle streams of warm water over his beaten body. Yet G never washed his body with soap. All he needed was the water washing over his sore body.

Ten minutes after entering the shower, G exited it and wrapped a beach towel around him. The plush velour felt soothing against his skin. He lingered on the bench for what seemed like an hour before patting his skin dry in the places missed by the towel. G attempted to dress in the sweats, but he was too relaxed and unsteady on his feet to finish the feat. Instead he rewrapped the towel around his chest and hobbled into the bedroom where he climbed onto the bed and fell into a deep sleep.

Hours later he awakened to what he believed to be the sound of someone knocking on his front door. G rolled over in bed and listened for the sound again. Nothing. It was part of a nightmare which had awakened him numerous times in the past two days.

He glanced at his semi-naked body, half covered with the aqua and sapphire blue beach towel and half exposed to the warm air around him. G examined the mostly healed welts on his chest and abdomen. He was afraid to touch them because he didn't want a repeat of what he experienced with the bottom of his feet. Instead he stared at them and waited for the flashbacks to start. Nothing happened. G reached out with one finger and traced the outline of the first welt high on his chest. He involuntarily shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut. No flashback. Good so far. G pressed his finger down his chest to his abdomen. _I'm completely out of shape._ The welts were worse around his abdominal area. He lifted his finger off his skin and opened the towel to expose the rest of his body. The welts peppered the skin all the way down to his feet. Even the tops of his feet were covered in welts.

Whomever tortured him spared no area of his body.

With his own assessment and the few flashbacks he had, G no longer needed to read the medical report. He surmised what happened to him. The evidence was quite clear. G dragged the towel back over his legs and rolled over in bed. All he could think about was sleeping. Sam would tell him it was avoidance. But what else could he do. G lacked the energy to even fix a meal. So far he'd eaten a bowl of ice cream. Hardly a meal to sustain him let alone heal his body. Time to call in the calvary. He hated the thought of someone invading his space and fixing all his meals, but on the other hand, he hated the thought of starvation.

G looked for his cane and found it lying on the floor next to the bed. He rolled to the opposite side and sat on the side of the bed facing the nightstand and picked up the burn phone. G punched in Sam's number while failing to note the time on a huge wall clock across from him. "Great."

Sam's groggy and familiar voice spoke on the other end of the phone.

"I just looked at the time. I'll call back later."

"No, you won't," Sam said. "Tell me what you need."

"It's nothing."

"It's never nothing at three in the morning."

He decided to go straight to his request. "I'm starving."

"I figured you'd call me when you couldn't stand it any longer."

"I slept for almost a day and a half," G said.

"Sounds about right," Sam said, "I'll be right over to make you something to eat."

"How about bringing me some take out. You pick it."

"Congenial."

"No, call it starving. I need to go."

G disconnected his phone and remembered he needed to get dressed before Sam arrived at his house. He lifted the cane off the floor and stood, allowing the towel to fall at his feet. G used the cane to move the towel aside and limped into the bathroom. This time dressing wasn't the effort it had been before, at least for the sweatshirt. The pants though were the same, a real pain to get over his sore feet, once past them he pulled them on without an effort. G decided that going barefoot would be best. He skipped the slippers for now, but picked them up and carried them into the bedroom. After placing them on the floor at the foot of the bed, he tottered down the hallway to the living room and waited in the recliner for Sam to arrive.

Sleep overtook him faster than he had imagined it would. Immediately G found himself in the same nightmare with someone knocking on the front door. He awakened with a start and listened. Again nothing. He reclined the chair and hoped this time he'd stay awake. In the distance, he heard keys in the front door. Without a weapon in his hand, G felt naked. His cane. At least he was able to knock someone to the floor with it, that's if he maintained his balance and kept on his feet.

G stood and readied himself with his cane, holding it overhead ready to strike.

Sam entered the living room and stopped several feet from his partner. "You okay?"

G lowered his makeshift weapon. "I think I need a gun for protection."

"You're too trigger happy right now." Sam eyed the cane at G's side.

"I need another cane or a walker, one just isn't cutting it for me." When he saw the take out in Sam's hands, G settled back down in the chair.

Sam placed the bags of food on the ottoman and scooted it closer to his partner. "Anything to drink?"

"Water's fine," G said, "milk tastes funky now."

"Funky?"

"Yeah, don't ask." G opened the bags to discover what Sam had brought him. Fish tacos in one bag, Chinese in the next bag, and Italian in the last one.

Sam brought a thermos of water and a full glass and set them on the dark mahogany side table. He settled down on the sofa. "I've got a walker for you in your closet."

"Didn't see it."

"It's folded and lying flat against a wall next to your bed roll."

"Can you bring it out for me?"

Sam left and returned a few minutes later with the walker.

"That's perfect with the wheels on all four legs." It was exactly what he needed right now with his messed up feet.

Sam showed him how to collapse the walker and open it back up. "Anything else you need?"

"You're leaving so soon?"

"No, just wondering if I've hit all the bases with the food I brought."

"That about sums it up, all the major food groups," G said with a straight face.

"Seriously, the major food groups?" Sam smirked.

"At least for me." G winked at him.

"Okay, smart aleck, glad to see this didn't take away your off kilter sense of humor."

G brought the fish taco bag on to his lap and changed his mind. The fish odor made him nauseous. "You'd better put this one in the refrigerator."

Sam took it from his partner and left the room.

G selected the Italian fare and found a generous sized piece of lasagna in the bag. He took several bites to test his nausea level with it and then continued to eat it between sips of water.

"What about the Chinese?"

"Don't know, I'm enjoying the lasagna."

"I can see that," Sam said. "Change in topic."

"I know what you're going to ask," G said, putting down his fork and taking a sip of water. "I've got a continuing nightmare with some bizarre noises in it. I'd swear someone is knocking on my front door, but no one is there."

"That is odd."

"And then there's the strange flashback in the kitchen with odd bodily sensations."

"Odd?"

"Yeah, it's as if someone's holding my head over the sink, I think in dirty dishwater."

"That is odd. Anything else?"

"I'm not so certain it takes place in my kitchen, and I'm close to passing out from someone's style of waterboarding," G said. "I'd just as soon not have another one of those episodes, because I almost passed out in my kitchen. This walker's going to help me when one of those flashbacks comes again."

"And you've got no memory about where you were for six months?" Sam asked.

"Nothing has come to me yet, except these excerpts from someone's kitchen." And there was one other thing which G wanted to check out before he told his partner about it. That one flash of memory with the oak floors and the metal box had come back to haunt three times.

"I'll be back here in about four hours to make you breakfast," Sam said.

"Sounds about right."

"If you're not feeling well enough to clean up after yourself, just leave it and one of your team will help."

"What? My team?"

"Remember our promise to help you."

"I didn't think that meant doing the dishes and other household chores," G said.

"Well, it's either that or you taking turns living at my place, Kensi's place, and Deeks' place."

"Hell no, man, forget that scenario."

"I'm crushed you would say that." Sam feigned an exaggerated pout.

"Believe me, it's not you I'm worried about."

"I'd be worried about them too especially with the odd hours you keep."

G looked around for something to toss at his partner. "Very funny." He looked forward to the day he could be on his own again. "Okay, see you in the morning."

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_**Thank you for reading. Reviews are welcomed and appreciated.**_


	7. Miniature Golf

_**Thank you all for the reviews!**_

* * *

**Miniature Golf**

**Chapter 7**

G woke to the sound a vacuum cleaner outside his bedroom door. He glanced at the clock, must've been Hetty's idea for a clock with huge numbers. It was about the size of a basketball and kept time in both standard and military times. Absolutely Hetty's idea. He definitely overslept again. Ten in the morning. He stretched and yawned and reached down to lift his cane off the floor. No cane. He looked around for the walker. Missing. Okay. G sat up in bed and scanned the room for his ambulatory aids. His walker stood at the foot of the bed with a set of sweats neatly folded on them. The cane was hung on a rack on the back of the door. He wondered if Sam had organized them.

He climbed out of bed and dressed in the sweats. Getting his pants on was still a huge feat because he had to sit on the bed, put one foot in and then wait to catch his breath. After a break, he stuck his other foot into his sweats. Then he needed to use the walker to help steady himself to pull up his sweats. _This is ridiculous_. G settled on the bed again and shoved his feet into his slippers and then stood, pushing the walker toward the bathroom. He checked himself in the mirror to make certain he was dressed appropriately for whomever was in the house.

The other day G ventured outside his room in his untied bathrobe. When he turned the corner out of the hallway, Hetty cleared her throat. While feeling the heat rising to his face, G quickly tied his bathrobe. At least he had worn his boxers. Everything looked good so far. He brushed his teeth and ran his hands through his longer-than-usual, dark blonde hair. Time for a hair cut. G hated when his hair hung down to his collar, tickling his neck. After the kidnapping though, he refused Sam's many offers to give him a buzz cut. The thought of a close cut sent shivers up his spine. He'd run out of excuses and one of these days Sam would call his bluff.

G hesitated in the hallway, wondering again who was vacuuming his home. He guided the walker into the next room and found Kensi and Deeks cleaning and dusting his living room.

Kensi looked up from the side table she was dusting. "Callen, hope we didn't wake you."

"Maybe," he said, not wanting to discourage them.

"We'll hurry up and finish," Deeks said, "besides I just finished vacuuming out here."

"No, it's okay." G settled down in the recliner.

"Sam said he was gonna be back with your groceries and something for breakfast," Deeks said. "Do you mind if I vacuum your bedroom?"

"No problem," G said, "and thanks."

"Feel better soon," Kensi said, patting G on a shoulder and following Deeks into the hallway.

G stifled the urge to bolt and hide. Something about that pat on the shoulder disturbed him. He hoped it didn't bring on flashbacks about his kidnapping.

In the distance a key jiggled in the front door. G readied himself for a possible intruder, but at the last minute remembered it was Sam. _I'm too darned jumpy even for myself._

"Hungry?" Sam asked, coming into the living room with groceries and a styrofoam take out box.

"Get me something good?" G accepted the hot container and placed it on the ottoman.

"Your favorite; eggs, bacon and toast with jam." Sam headed toward the kitchen.

G opened it and noticed there were no utensils. Before he could ask for a fork, Sam came over to him with one and a glass of milk. "Thanks." He brought the carton onto his lap and scarfed up his food.

"Hey, slow down," Sam said, sitting down on the sofa.

"Hungry," G said between bites. "Didn't realize how hungry I was until I smelled the bacon and eggs." He drank some milk and glanced at his partner, knowing Sam wasn't sitting on the sofa to keep him company.

"Hetty wants you to utilize the availability of your team," Sam said, picking up a glass of milk and taking a few sips.

"You're not eating?"

"Already ate and I'm in the mood for milk."

"The what of my team? In English please."

"Your team is here everyday keeping your home clean and tidy on her dime," he said, setting his glass on the side table. "It's about time you started talking about your ordeal."

"The problem is I don't remember much," G said.

"You've had nightmares and flashbacks, right?"

"Well, yes, but there's not much to tell."

"Perhaps Hetty needs to call in the calvary for you."

"You mean Nate?"

"Yeah."

G sighed. "What's he gonna do? Draw it out of me with a salve?"

"Very funny," Sam said, "of course not, but I thought you might like to talk to someone besides us."

"No." G ate the rest of his breakfast and drank his milk. He placed the empty container on the ottoman and patted his stomach.

"Speaking of that," Sam eyed his partner's out-of-shape body, "you're about due for some exercise."

"What? Seriously? Come on, man, I can barely get dressed and you want me to run a marathon."

"It's not what I want," he said. "It's what the little lady wants."

"She better not hear you say that about her," G said, winking at his partner.

"She says some miniature golf for the team and you might help you get back to your old self."

"Miniature golf? Really? She said that?"

"Well, I don't think you're ready for big boy golf yet."

G smirked. "Big boy golf, huh, very funny."

"Think about golfing on a par nine course with a Rollator Walker."

"Okay, I get the picture, it just wouldn't work." He imagined trying to heft his golf bag over a shoulder while pushing the walker. "How about one of those Rollators with a seat?"

"Remember, exercise is the point of it."

G made a face at his partner.

"At least it would get you out of the house."

"You gonna protect me if my kidnappers decide to come after me again?"

Sam shook his head. "You don't think I can?"

"Didn't say that at all. Didn't even hint at it." G eyed his partner.

"I know that look."

"What? I'm innocent."

* * *

**#**

* * *

G bent over and placed his aqua-blue golf ball on the Studio City Miniature Golf Park's hole one putting green. He started to lose his balance and caught himself with the putter. He glanced over his shoulder and glared at his partner.

"Just go slower then."

"How much slower can I go? There's a line after us waiting to start." G watched Sam look over his shoulder. "Made you look."

"One more time and I'll—"

"You'll come over here and golf for me?" He winked at his partner.

"You're in rare form this afternoon."

"Not exactly looking forward to playing all eighteen holes."

"Ah, is that the story."

G readied his putter and took a couple of practice swings.

"You missed. Twice."

"Very funny. Those were practice runs."

"So now you practice running too?"

G shook his head and lined up his putter. He swung at the ball and it bounced over the boundaries of hole one and landed on hole two's putting green.

"That's pathetic."

"Out of practice."

"Add two."

"Didn't Kensi and Deeks say they'd be here?"

"Yep, we did," Kensi said.

G startled and turned to face her.

"You're kind of jumpy," Sam said.

"That's an understatement," G said, grabbing his Rollator walker and pushing it toward his wayward ball.

"Too vigorous for miniature golf," Deeks said.

G retrieved the ball with one hand while keeping his other hand on the walker. He sauntered back to the first hole to watch his teammates hit their balls. "I think I need practice pretending I'm playing little boy golf." G eyed his partner, waiting for a snide remark from him. It appeared that Sam had ignored him because he placed his ball on the putting green and swung his putter without even looking in G's direction. "Is that the way you're gonna play this?" He watched Sam's ball go exactly where it was supposed to go. "Did you all practice without me?"

"Nope," Sam said, taking his final shot into the hole.

"Someone cheated and didn't tell me." G set his ball on the green again.

"You don't get a second chance."

"I'm playing by my own rules." He focused on the hole just around a small mound and swung his putter.

"Fore!" Sam yelled to Deeks and Kensi.

"Seriously?" G asked. He watched his ball go around the mound, stopping only inches from the hole.

Kensi broke out in an infectious giggle and stepped back, giving her team leader a wide berth for access to the hole.

"It wasn't that bad."

Deeks stifled a grin.

Sam stood opposite his partner, eyeing his stance.

"What?" G looked at his position and then at Sam. "I'm not counting the first one."

"I'm counting it."

"Come on, man, at least give me a handicap."

"You've already got one." Sam chuckled.

G smirked. "Very funny, okay, it's true, I've got a huge one."

"Yeah, between the ears."

"Sam, I'm trying to concentrate and you're making me laugh too much."

"Nonsense, there's no such thing as laughing too much after you've been cooped up for days."

G readied his putter and gave the ball a light tap.

"Fore!" Sam yelled again.

"It made it."

"By inches."

"Next time don't yell so loud and stop saying that word," G said.

"Well, last time you hit your ball into the second hole."

"Rub it in." He leaned over to pick up his ball and started to lose his balance.

Sam rushed over to his partner's side and steadied him.

"I told you I needed a handicap."

Sam shook his head and helped G over to the Rollator walker. "Maybe you should sit down on that thing before you fall down."

"So now you're gonna tell me I was right." G reached the next hole and sat on the pull down seat.

"You're always right, partner."

"There's that word." G smirked.

"What? I didn't say, 'fore.'"

* * *

**#**

* * *

An hour later, G picked up his ball from the ninth hole and sighed. "I can't finish the course." He found a bench between the ninth and tenth holes and eased himself down onto it, using his walker for balance.

Sam sat next to him. "You look a little pale around the edges."

"See, it _is_ time to go back home."

"How about something to eat and getting out of the sun for a bit?"

G raised his baseball cap and eyed his partner. "I wish that would solve my problem." He shuddered. A glint coming off of something metallic over his partner's shoulders caught his eye. G stared in that direction, trying to find where the glint had disappeared.

"See something?" Sam glanced over his shoulder in the same direction G was looking.

"It's nothing."

"Seriously, nothing, not with that look and your intense focus."

G brought his gaze back to his partner. "Okay, I thought I saw the flash of a gun at about waist high for someone standing."

"That fairly specific." Sam stood and performed a 360 degree scan of their immediate and short distance areas. "I don't see anything," he said, sitting back down next to his partner.

"I told you it was…" The same shimmery light now came from a closer position to the right of Sam. "Need to go. Now."

"Seriously—"

A bullet whizzed between them and missed them both.

People all around them screamed and scattered, darting this way and that way, and in a matter of seconds, no one was left in the miniature golf park. In the next moment, his partner tackled him, sending them both to a grassy landing near the tenth hole. G sighed when his body came to rest on the grass. _I am thankful it's not the cement walkway_. "You believe me now?" he asked from under his partner's bulky body.

"Keep your voice down and follow my directions," Sam said.

"No problem there."

Sam climbed off of his partner, withdrew his weapon, and helped G to his feet. "Kensi, Deeks, surround him. Let's get out of here."

They edged toward the Challenger, acting as a cohesive unit.

"Deeks." Sam tossed him the keys to the Challenger. "Get it started."

"You let him drive the car while I was gone, but you—"

"Keep your voice lowered," Sam said.

"Not fair." G pouted.

"I promised to let you drive after you're feeling 100%."

"Gee, thanks Mom."

Sam shot his partner a look.

As they neared the Challenger, G cried out and slapped the back of his right thigh. It felt as if something stung him there. Instead his hand rested on something slick and slimy. He brought it to his face and stared at the blood trickling down his fingers and palm. "Houston, I've got a problem."

Sam faced him. "Where did that come from?" He opened the Challenger's passenger side door. "When did this happen?"

"Stop asking me questions I can't possibly answer." G pointed to the back of his thigh and attempted to climb into the passenger seat. "I think I need help."

"That's what I'm here for." Sam assisted G with seat, reclining it fully.

"That might be too far. Where's a towel?"

"Don't worry about a little blood."

"I don't think that it's a little blood."

Sam threw a towel onto the seat. "Satisfied?"

"Would you two girls make up your minds and get into the car," Kensi said, snickering at their antics.

"Girls?" G eyed her. "I hope the two of you are keeping your eyes on the surroundings." G gingerly sat down on the seat. "Maybe a little up on the head."

She giggled some more.

Sam raised the back of the seat. "We good?"

G held up his hand to stop his partner's progress. "Perfect."

Sam switched places with Deeks and secured his seatbelt. He reached across G's lap to buckle him into the seat.

G brushed his hands aside. "I'm not helpless." He pulled the seatbelt around him and fastened it.

Sam shook his head.

Kensi giggled again. "You two girls ready to go yet?"

"Why don't you and Deeks scan the area one last time?" G asked, ignoring her comments.

"A full sweep five minutes ago revealed nothing," she said.

"Deeks?" G leaned over to Sam's side of the car.

"Same here, nothing."

"Okay, follow us to the house and keep your eyes peeled."

"Maybe they should call Hetty," Sam said to his partner.

"I'm not going there," he said. "Next thing you know she'll be toting that first aid kit of her's to my house."

"Hetty?" Deeks asked with an innocent sounding tone.

"You know, the little exams she wants to perform on us," G said.

"You're afraid of that petite lady with her little red box of goodies." Sam smirked. "At least call her and give her a heads up."

"On second thought…" G thought about it longer. "Let's wait until I get home. It'll give her less time to remember to bring stuff with her."

"Chicken," Sam said.

"You're darned right."

* * *

**_Thank you for reading. I'm looking forward to the reviews._**


	8. A Shot of Proof

_**Thank you for the reviews. **_

_**The plot deepens...**_

* * *

**A Shot of Proof**

**Chapter 8**

The moment he arrived at his house, Sam asked G to change into a pair of shorts. G laid on the sofa in the position Sam suggested, face down with his right thigh on the outside. He felt completely exposed and started having a flashback the moment his partner came over to his side. "Don't touch me."

"Okay, how am I supposed to examine the wound?"

"I don't know, man, just don't touch me."

Sam handed the stack of towels in his hands to his partner. "I need these under your leg."

"Seriously? No way are you touching me." G rolled over to his left side and placed several layers of towels over the plastic sheet under him and laid down on the sofa again. He mentally prepared himself for the inevitable and the necessary. "Okay, I think I'm ready. Are your hands warm?"

"Are you going to keep asking me questions and avoiding this?" Sam asked. "Remember, it's either me or Hetty."

G sighed. "I'm ready." He squeezed his eyes shut and readied his body, tensing up every muscle and expecting the worst possible outcome: getting triggered further and having more flashbacks. When Sam touched his thigh, G jumped and rolled to his left side, hiding his body with a blanket.

"Okay, maybe you could use some liquor to relax you."

"A gigantic rubber mallet would work great."

Sam left the living room and returned with a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey.

"Feels like the Old West where the whiskey was used as a sedative."

"Got any better ideas?" Sam poured the hard liquor into the glass and offered it to his partner.

G took the glass and downed the whiskey in one swallow and set the glass on the ottoman. "Nope." He watched Sam pour him another one. "I don't know about this."

"No concussion."

In one swig the second shot glass was emptied. "Okay, I'm drawing the line at two." G laid down face first on the sofa. "It feels close to what a rubber mallet probably does to you."

Sam placed the bottle and shot glass on the side table and kneeled at his partner's side. "You're gonna feel my warm hands on your thigh." He touched his partner's skin and waited for a fight or flight response.

"Okay, those _are_ warm hands." G tugged the blanket around his upper body. "Can you turn up the heat in here?"

"Possible reaction to what we're doing here," Sam said. "The wound is on the side of your leg. See?"

G gathered his strength and glanced down at his leg. He breathed out a sigh of relief. "How does it look?"

"Like someone shot you."

"What?" G sat up and examined his wound. "That's not a good scenario."

"Well, at least they didn't try to kill you." Sam took a knife out of his kit.

"You're not using that on me," G said, rolling away from him.

"Okay, you need to either see Hetty or go to the hospital."

"I hate hospitals. I hate doctors. I hate needles."

"Score one for Hetty."

"And one for you?" G asked, lying back down.

"Scream all you want."

"Wait, give me another shot of whiskey."

"Coming up." Sam offered the shot glass to his partner.

"Make it two." G drank two small glasses of whiskey. "Wait a bit for it to take effect."

Sam took up his knife again and kneeled in front of the sofa.

"Mr. Hanna, what in the blazes do you think you're doing?" Hetty walked into the living room and stood next to Sam.

"Hetty, just let him."

"I've got my satchel right here."

_Great. Talk about trigger happy. _G sighed. "He's got this," he said with slurred speech. G curled his upper body further to watch his partner.

Hetty eyed the whiskey bottle on the side table. "I see you two got this covered. If you need any help let me know." She sat on the recliner.

Sam sliced into G's skin and pushed the knife blade under the bullet. It slid out and landed on the carpet. "Great, not exactly what I had in mind."

With a gloved hand, Hetty reached down and retrieved the bullet, placing it into an evidence bag. "Let's get this identified."

Before G could protest, Sam filled a syringe and injected it into the side of his thigh. "What in the…"

"Got to clean this wound out and stitch it up." He poured betadine over it.

G winced and reminded himself to lie still. "With a needle?"

Sam smirked. "Know something else which will work?"

"Okay, you're right." G braced himself for the feel of the needle. "You know how much I hate needles."

"Yes."

But he failed to feel a thing. The whiskey had worked well.

After five small stitches, Sam bandaged his partner's thigh. "Okay, that should feel numb for a while."

"I feel numb too."

"I suggest you don't play golf in the next twenty-four hours."

"Golf? Now why in the… it was a joke, right, I hope." G relaxed further into his whiskey stupor.

"What I want to know is where were you when the shooter got you?" Hetty asked.

"He doesn't know," Sam said.

Hetty stood and slid the evidence bag into her purse. "I'll get this to the lab right away." She left the living room.

G heard the front door open and close. He took in a deep breath and released it with a loud, long sigh.

"My sediments exactly." Sam cleaned his equipment and placed it back into his first aid kit.

"My question is where did you get all this… stuff?"

"Left over from my Navy SEAL days."

"Thank you."

"You want to sleep there?"

"Can't think of moving an inch," G said, yawning and trying to pull the blanket over the rest of his body.

Sam assisted his partner's efforts and tucked the blanket around his feet and then sat on the recliner.

"Wait, you're staying here?"

"Somebody's got to protect you." Sam pushed the chair's headrest back and closed his eyes.

* * *

**#**

* * *

At first G believed the knocking sound awakened him, but it was something else altogether. Either he was sleepwalking or he wasn't really awake. Everything was off. G searched the house for Sam and couldn't find him. He tried to remember if Sam had told him he was spending the night. He failed to recall the conversation. G paused outside his office and stared into the room. He attempted to step forward, but was unable to move. It was as if his feet were glued to the floor.

Out of nowhere, Sam appeared by his side and whispered, "Where is it?"

G faced him and found no one there. He raced through the house, looking for his partner. Again he stopped outside his office and stared into it.

He heard a different voice whisper in his ear, "Where is it? You'd better find it."

He flipped on his heels and thought for certain he'd be staring into the intruder's face. No one was there. He ran through his house again, breathless.

"G?"

He opened his eyes and gazed into his partner's dark brown ones.

"You okay?"

G wondered if this was a real person or another dream. "Touch me."

"What?" Sam studied his partner.

"I know, that was before when you wanted to take that bullet out and this is now. Touch me."

Sam reached out to touch him.

G felt nothing, absolutely nothing. This had to be another dream, no, a nightmare. G reached out and grabbed what he thought was Sam's arm, instead he glommed onto a doorjamb, but it wasn't one from his house. He found himself in the underground chamber where he'd been tortured for six months.

"Tell us," a man's voice whispered from somewhere in the dark.

He decided to answer this time. "Tell you what?" His words echoed off the concrete walls. G stumbled forward in the dark, using the walls to guide himself through the maze of corridors and rooms.

"You know…"

He flipped on his heels and chased after the faceless voice. Now in his own home he found himself at his office door, staring into the room and wondering again why he was there.

"You know where it is. Tell me."

G turned on a dime, the fastest he could, and still the man who had spoken to him disappeared before his eyes, as if he were disintegrating into the wall. He faced the office again and examined every square inch of the room with his eyes. After his diligent search for whatever was supposed to be in this room, G stepped forward. The moment he entered the room, his focus centered on the oak floor.

He shot straight up from a dead sleep in what he believed was his bed.

"G?"

"Sam, you've got to touch me."

"Okay, now you want me to touch you."

"I know, sounds crazy," he said, pulling his blanket around his body. He shivered and tried to push away the strange nightmares. "Come on, Sam, I need you to touch me."

"Where?" Sam brought the recliner forward and stood.

"Anywhere but my messed up thigh."

Sam stepped forward and touched his partner's head.

Immediately G was transported back into the hallway outside his office. _I'm going crazy. This isn't happening to me._ He stepped forward into the office and tried to remember the moment he entered the room before. What had he seen which told him where _it_ was? All that presented itself to him in his mind was a black object.

"Show me where it is."

G flipped around and faced the intruder in his house. No one was there. He turned back to the room and attempted to refocus on the task at hand, but the voice which sounded as if it were coming from Sam haunted him. G scanned the room again, looking for 'it.'

"You know where it is. Tell us or we'll beat you again."

This time G stayed focused on the room and its contents because now he knew the voice was guiding him to a device or object in his office. He concentrated on the oak floor. His mind flipped through pictures as if they were a slide show. One of the postcard-like scenes stunned him. G reached out to steady himself on the doorjamb and lost his balance. Instead he found himself in a free fall, stumbling backward for a longer distance than was possible, as if he had parachuted out of a plane and his gear had failed.

* * *

**#**

* * *

G jerked awake, yelled, and came to full awareness of his surroundings. He lifted the blanket off his leg and examined his thigh. This was real. His leg ached and burned.

"You okay?" Sam asked, bringing his chair into an upright position.

"Maybe… maybe not." He pulled the covers around himself. "I've got a weird request."

"For some strange food?"

"No, not that, I need you to touch me."

Sam stood and walked over to his partner's side. "Seriously? First you tell me to stay away from you, and now you want me to touch you?"

"Okay, I know it's an odd request from me, but just do it."

"Why?"

"Don't ask questions just do it, okay, do it already!"

Sam reached out and touched his partner's right shoulder.

"You're real. I feel that. Your hand's warm."

"I think you had too many shots of that whiskey last night."

"No, it was the right amount because I felt no pain during your pseudo-surgery."

"My pseudo-surgery, as you like to call it, got us some evidence."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for your… services, but I'd rather not get shot to obtain the identification of my kidnappers." _And I just as soon not get shot again to learn the identity of the black object hidden somewhere in my office._

* * *

**_Thank for reading and I'm looking forward to your reviews._**


	9. The Black Box

**Thank you all for the encouraging reviews which spur me onward to tell this story.**

* * *

**The Black Box**

**Chapter 9**

After Sam fed him dinner and left, G decided to pursue what his mind had focused on since yesterday. In spite of the consequences for lifting a heavy object, the flashbacks and nightmares drove him to explore the oak floor in his office.

The walker proved to be an excellent tool to get him from point A to point B without much effort, and in addition gave him energy to search for the object. In his office, he looked at the floor exactly how he had in the many nightmares which plagued him during yesterday's fitful nap. There they were just how he pictured them during the first flashback he had soon after coming home from the hospital. G entered the room and pushed the walker to one side. He positioned the new desk chair near the walker in case he lacked the strength to lift himself to the height of the walker. G lowered to the floor as slow as he could, knowing every inch of his body, especially his thigh, would hurt while lying or sitting on the hard surface.

The moment his body fully rested on the floor, G winced and stifled a yelp.

He shoved the pain aside for now and examined the oak floor. G pressed his fingers along the planks' edges and noticed they were slightly raised and worn. It was true. He had previously removed the floorboards. Many questions filtered through his mind about why he would've placed the object in question under the floor. For the moment, the answers weren't important because staying on task needed to remain foremost in his mind. G removed a flathead screwdriver from his pocket and slid it into the end of one plank. He jimmied the tool up and down and back and forth until the floorboard lifted upward, revealing the space below it. He could barely see an edge of a black box. With one piece of the floor out of the way, G easily removed six more planks, exposing the entire object. It was thirteen by thirteen inches square. G thought it wouldn't weigh much until he attempted to lift it out of the floor. It slipped from his hand and bounced back into its spot. The action caused his mind to wander again, wondering how he managed to get the object into its tight compartment and why. He scanned the office looking for something which would make a come-along. G ripped a cord from the printer, easy and cheap enough to replace later, and jury-rigged one end to the desk chair and the other to the handle on the metal box.

After pulling himself off the floor using the desk chair, he sat in it. He used his legs and moved toward the door, trying to pull the heavy metal box from its confined space. The angle was all wrong, and the power cord stretched to the breaking point.

_Not good. I need something stronger._

He lowered himself to the floor once more and removed the USB cable from the printer and computer, and intertwined it with the power cord and then retied them both to the chair and black box.

Sitting again, G jerked the chair in one direction and then at the last minute in opposite direction.

Out popped the metal box.

It flew through the air toward him.

He ducked and tumbled off the chair onto the unforgiving hardwood floor and cried out.

The metal box slammed into the chair's back and crashed to the floor with a loud thud.

A loud cracking noise quickly followed, reminding G of the sound an earthquake makes when it moves the floor.

G startled and fell quiet. He stared at the box which had fallen inches from his head.

The whole sequence of events occurred in less than twenty-seconds, yet it seemed to go on forever.

Now he questioned his own sanity about purchasing two waterproof and fireproof safes. In the future, he needed to select enclosures which weighed less._ I never want to go through this again. _G sat up and moved over to the black safe and examined the lock on it. His memory about the contents and the safe's combination were unavailable, lost somewhere in his traumatized mind. At least the memory of the black box was real.

G stuffed wads of scrunched up printer paper into the empty space under the floor and replaced the floorboards, making them look as if were never moved. For now, this makeshift filler worked, but he needed an alternative solution for long term.

His plan to simply take the box back to his closet was out of the question. Even getting the box onto the chair was impossible at this point. _There goes another idea._ _There has to be a way._ G searched his office for a device for dragging the heavy box. He found nothing substantial and decided on a blanket from the linen closet. G selected one, brought it back to the office, and tried to lift the box onto it. Instead, he found that teetering the black box back and forth helped it catch on the corner of the blanket. After thirty minutes of joggling the object, the heavy metal box finally rested on the blanket.

That's when G saw the huge gouge in the newly finished and polished oak floor. Crap. The cracking noise. No way to explain that when he wasn't supposed to be doing any heavy lifting.

G crawled up onto the chair once again, and propelled himself toward the master bedroom with the heavy metal box in tow. Even though the distance between the two rooms couldn't be more than thirty feet, he stopped often to make certain the box wasn't slipping off the blanket. Once inside the closet, G unfurled his bedroll and attempted to stuff the box inside it. His effort turned out to be a bigger feat than getting the darned box out of from under the floorboards. It took him more than an hour to get the box off the bedcover and into the bedroll. With exhaustion setting in fast, G gave up on trying to conceal it further and only covered it with his old sleeping bag.

Without the energy to go back and retrieve the walker, he pulled himself onto the bed and collapsed in a heap. He dreamt about the box and stashing it in his closet.

Two hours later he awakened with a start and remembered he had left the power and USB cords attached to the chair. Telltale evidence. He slid off the bed onto the floor and scooted over to the closet, untied both cords from the box and the chair, and hid them inside his bedroll. Next he maneuvered the chair back to the office and exchanged it for his walker. Once back in the bedroom, G climbed back into bed. His mind wandered to finding a solution for the gouge in the oak floor and the new void under the floorboards, but before answers revealed themselves, G fell asleep.

* * *

**#**

* * *

The nightmare about someone knocking at his door got louder than ever. G startled awake and listened for the noise. Nothing… no… wait… Someone _was_ pounding on something, and it sounded as if it were coming from the kitchen. G climbed off the bed, pushed the walker into the living room, and beyond it into the kitchen.

"When did you get here?" G asked.

Sam kept his back to his partner. "Early this morning around 6 AM, but you were out cold so I cleaned up and then started making breakfast."

"I had a rough night," G said, deciding the less he revealed the better. "I'm going to sit down in the living room."

Sam turned around and faced his partner. "Before you do that, maybe you'd better tell me how that gouge got in the office floor."

G stared at his partner unable to speak. He hoped the gouge remained a secret until he figured out how to conceal it. He swallowed down a hard lump in his throat. "A gouge?"

"Let me show you."

G followed Sam to the office. He stood in the doorway, trying to keep his composure about what happened in the room.

"Did you fall?"

"Nope."

"Maybe you were doing something on the chair you shouldn't have been doing."

"Are trying to say I was lifting something heavy? Because there's no way I could possibly do that in my condition." There he said it. He outright lied to his partner. It wasn't what he planned to do, but it just flowed out of his mouth that way. Now he wondered how to take it back, how to make it right, and how to erase everything he had done in the office. If everything he carried out in the last year disappeared his life would be a whole lot better and a whole lot less complicated.

"G?"

He startled hard. Sam was inches from him and he hadn't noticed his approach.

"Something is off with you today."

"I had a bad—"

"You said that, but this right here, is beyond that."

"It's probably my leg giving me trouble," G said. "Maybe I need something to eat."

"Seriously, is that what you're claiming this is about?" Sam eyed the gouge in the floor and turned back to face G.

_Damn. _ Sweat beaded up on his forehead and trickled down the back of his neck.

"Let's go talk in the other room."

G stood in the hallway while Sam passed him. He hesitated to move in the direction his partner had taken. Five minutes later, he emerged from the hallway and settled in the brown leather recliner.

Sam brought in breakfast and set a platter down on the table-topped, brown leather ottoman. "Look, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but something doesn't add up."

G took a plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast on it and stared at it rather than eating it, even though he was famished from the midnight mission in his office.

"G? Did you hear what I just said?"

"No."

"Why don't you eat and we'll talk afterward?"

G set the plate back on the ottoman. "I can't because I just lied to you."

"When?"

"I know exactly how the gouge got in the floor, and I know Hetty's going plow me a new one but I had to—"

"Slow down, man, take it easy, okay, one sentence at a time," Sam said. "I've never heard you sound so rattled and—"

"Because I've done something impulsive, maybe even stupid."

"What?"

There was that look Sam often gave him, one eyebrow raised and the stare. G swallowed hard. "I know why I was kidnapped," he said, pausing to drink some milk. After two long swigs of it, his throat still felt as if it had a huge unmovable lump in it. "I caused my own problem."

"Okay, backup to the gouge in the floor."

"Nope, I've got to go back further than that."

"To when?"

"You were on assignment in another state, and I was assignment in this state and… damn, I went off the deep end and did something out of character, well, at least of character for my recent past."

"Meaning?"

"I haven't gone rogue in a long time."

"What are we talking about? Taking drugs or money or—"

"Sam… we're talking about something more sinister and dangerous than drugs or money."

"Okay, show me."

"I couldn't remember the combination on the lock last night," G said, "but I do now. I dreamt about the whole thing." And other terrifying nightmares where Hetty chased him with some type of weapon in her hand, and Sam ran after her, yelling for her to stop. Had it not been a nightmare, the scene playing out in his mind would've been funny. Those nightmares occurred one after the other throughout his restless sleep.

"The lock?"

G guided the walker into the master bedroom. Right now he wanted to rename his bedroom the dumbstruck room, because he was at a loss for words to describe what he'd done months ago. G stopped near the closet and got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it. "You'll have to come in here to see it."

Sam moved the walker aside and stepped into the closet next to his partner. He gawked at the black safe partially wrapped in G's bedroll.

"I can't get it out of here," he said. "It was difficult enough getting it into the closet."

"To hide from me and Hetty, right?"

G sighed. "Yeah."

"Get out and I'll maneuver it out of the closet."

G scooted out of the closet.

"Make a path because I'm coming through and I'm not stopping until I reach the living room."

"I don't know if that's a good idea, because of what's in—"

"Stuff it." Sam glared at his partner.

G moved out of the way and stood with the walker to one side of the doorway.

Sam came out of the closet with the safe in both arms and brought it into the living room.

G watched his partner gently set it on the floor, something he could've never done himself. Not only that, G had lost much physical strength over the last eight months.

"Tell me the combination."

"I don't think this is a good—"

"I'll determine what's a good idea and what isn't." Sam crouched and waited for the numbers.

"My birthdate and year."

"Now there's a bad idea."

"Only I knew where it was hidden in my house."

"Yeah, and now it's no longer hidden there." Sam dialed in the numbers and opened the safe. His jaw dropped open. "Seriously? You ripped this off from an ops?"

"I know, stupid, huh?"

"Very stupid, no wonder those thugs or whomever they were beat you with a rod." Sam carefully pulled out the nuclear device and laid it on the floor. "Of all the stupid—"

"You don't need to remind me." He imagined Sam or Hetty wanting to beat him with the same rod. His nightmares had those elements in them.

"Remind you? Seriously? This could've blown up your house and killed who knows how many…" He stopped and examined it closer. "I guess you're off the hook for the most part."

"Yeah, there's no way to detonate it without the other piece," G said.

"Which I suppose those thugs have?"

"Nope, I've got both items in different safes."

"I don't suppose you're gonna tell me where that is," Sam said.

"It's in my garage," he said, "I'm surprised they didn't notice it when they dropped me off there." He vaguely remembered them dragging him into his own garage. G secretly hoped for death because of the intense pain throughout his body. He startled. Again his partner was closer to him and he hadn't notice Sam move.

"Show me."

"I'm too tired to go out there."

"Okay, later after you recuperate from your early morning escapade."

"What are you going to tell Hetty?"

"It's not what I'm gonna tell her, it's what you're gonna tell her."

_Great. _It was the last thing he wanted to do. Again his mind wandered to a scene with Hetty chasing after him with something in her hand.

Sam handed G his cellphone.

"After I eat."

"I'll buy that, you need sustenance."

G laid the cellphone on the side table and picked up the plate of cold food.

"Let me warm that up for you." Sam gave G a slice of bacon and took the plate into the kitchen and returned with it after a minute.

G grabbed the hot plate and scarfed down his breakfast as if he hadn't eaten in days.

"Did you taste it?" Sam smirked and eyed his partner's plate.

"Hungry." He picked up the cellphone and autodialed Hetty's number.

"Mr. Callen, good to hear from you," she said, "where's your partner?"

"Sitting next to me on the sofa eating his breakfast," G said.

"Well, that's good enough for now," Hetty said. "Why aren't you calling from _your_ burn phone instead of _Sam's_ burn phone?"

"Long story."

"Make it short I need to get back to your case."

"This _is_ about my case and why I was kidnapped," G said. "It's all come back to me."

"Has it now?"

"Yes, in details I'd rather forget."

"I'll be there shortly and you and your partner can tell me all about it."

Hetty's end of the line went dead.

He wondered what Hetty had chased him with in his nightmares and hoped she wasn't bringing anything with her that looked like a weapon. And he wondered where he could hide in his home if she arrived with anything other than her purse. Crap. Hetty always carried a concealed weapon.

* * *

_**Thank for reading.**_


	10. Resurface

**Thank you for the reviews.**

* * *

**Resurface**

**Chapter 10**

G felt too close to Hetty or maybe Hetty was too close to him. She sat on the brown leather sofa, and he sat on the brown leather recliner.

They were less than two feet from each other.

Either way, he wanted to move away from her and at the same time he needed to keep his eye on her person and purse. G feared his nightmares had more than a surreal component.

"Now then Mr. Callen, let's start from the beginning."

To his ears, Hetty sounded like a lawyer and police officer wrapped into one, and he wondered when she'd start reading him his Miranda rights.

Before he opened his mouth she spoke again. "Was this that ops where evidence went missing?"

G tried not to gawk at her. He attempted to keep his face calm and non-emotional, but he knew by the look on her face that he must've revealed something to her. "A different one." It was all he could muster and his voice had the quality of a squeaking mouse.

"Go on." She encouraged.

He cringed and found himself at a loss for words.

"G?"

"I…" He stood and rushed out of the room. Well, as fast as one could rush with a Rollator Walker. It was the fastest he had pushed the darned thing since he had gotten shot two days ago. In the master bathroom, he locked the door and stood in front of the open toilet seat, waiting for all of his breakfast to land in the toilet. Instead dry heaves wracked his body from neck to stomach. Sweat beaded up on his face and neck. It was the worst case of stage fright G suffered from in a long time.

He remembered the first time Hetty asked for a report after an ops. G stood before her and lacked the words to communicate even the simplest sentence structure. After several false starts, the words flowed freely from his mouth. Back then he had a good excuse; young and inexperienced. Right now, he understood the cause of his stage fright as well; G had stolen a nuclear device from an ops. Actually, the root of his nerves stemmed from something else he'd done. That made him feel jittery all over inside. He hoped it wouldn't present itself to the outside world yet. G needed more time to divulge his secret, but he doubted that would happen now with Hetty here.

He rinsed a washcloth in cool water and placed it over his whole face and then pushed the walker back to the living room. G lowered himself into the recliner.

Hetty stared at him. He deserved every bit of that look.

"I ripped it off from an ops and there's no justification," G said, the words finally flowing from his trembling lips. He hoped she couldn't see them moving, and he hoped she couldn't see the beads of sweat forming on his face and neck again.

"Mr. Callen!"

Yep, he deserved her outrage. After all, he had gone rogue and he promised her and his partner it would never happen again. _So much for promises._

"Why on God's green Earth would you do such a thing?"

"At the time I had my reasons and now they don't seem that important." Except in one way one point had remained critical, protecting his country from potential harm.

"And those men who kidnapped you?"

"Want their device back."

She looked him over several times. "They want it back?"

"Yes, you heard me right the first time," he said, rubbing the side of his thigh where he had been shot. "It was theirs and I took it, hoping for a while they wouldn't know it was missing."

"You were undercover in their operation, if I remember correctly."

"Yes."

"And you never thought about the consequences?"

"Not once."

"I'm glad I wasn't around when this happened," Sam said.

"Yeah, I know what you would've done to me." He glanced at his partner and then down at the ottoman between them.

"What now, Mr. Callen? Have you thought about your next move?"

"I've got no next move because I never thought I'd survive their kidnapping and beatings." He now wished they killed him as they threatened to do numerous times during his incarceration in that cement hell hole. But they wanted their stuff back, as they put it, and failed to find it on their search of his home. "Heck, I had no next move after I stole the device. I just knew I couldn't let those creeps keep it and start another economic melt down of our country or the world for that matter."

"And you decided that no one could help you with this dilemma."

"What do you want Hetty? I went rogue and going rogue means going it alone. What part of going rogue don't you understand?" He never thought those words would come out of his mouth. At least his lips no longer trembled, but the sweat continued to trickle down the back of his neck onto his too-long hair, reminding him to get a hair cut soon.

"Mr. Callen!" She stood and smoothed down her black, pin-striped pant suit.

He waited for her to draw her weapon.

Hetty walked past him and clasped her hands behind her back.

G disliked that pondering pose because it meant one thing; she was drawing a weapon somewhere in her mind. Maybe this time the weapon was meant for someone else. _Fat chance._

"Where's the detonator?" she asked.

"In the garage."

"Here? In _your_ garage?"

"Yes, hidden in another safe though less accessible than the nuclear device," G said. "I had to make certain someone couldn't easily obtain it."

"You'll take me to it right now!" She pointed toward the garage.

G stood and guided the walker toward it.

Hetty took out her cellphone.

G imagined she was calling the calvary. Whether it was for him or for the nuclear device he wasn't certain. Possibly both and that spelled doom in the simplest of terms.

He stopped and faced her. "If you're calling for more man power, you'll need a backhoe," G said.

"Where in blazes is it, Mr. Callen?"

"At least ten feet under and covered with cement," he said, walking again to the garage. "I even followed the rules and obtained a permit and called the utility companies."

"So you didn't go _all the way_ rogue." Sam snickered and matched his partner's strides.

* * *

**#**

* * *

G was thankful for one thing, his partner's sense of humor during his time of mental and physical crises. At first he thought Sam took sides with Hetty, but he soon learned his partner supported him. He stayed back from the backhoe as it dug up the cement in the front part of his garage.

Sam stood by his partner's side, arms folded.

G understood the stance; deep in thought about the next step they should take.

"With you out of commission, things are at a stand still for now." Sam faced his partner. "But as soon as Hetty gives the signal, you and I are gonna handle this situation dead on, no pun intended."

"I've got to say one thing to you. Thank you for not totally flipping out on me and our partnership."

"And I've got to say one thing to you. Don't ever go rogue again unless you pass it by me first." Sam winked at him.

G sighed.

When the steel bucket on the backhoe connected with something solid, the operator stopped the equipment.

Hetty was the first person to venture over to where her workers had been digging, and peer over the edge into it. "What in blazes did you bury it in?"

"An oversized gun safe," G said, looking over the edge beside her. The pit spanned twice the length and width of the container buried in it.

The NCIS construction workers lowered a ladder into the deep hole and started fitting the gun safe with a rope and pulley system.

"How heavy is it?" one of the workers asked Hetty.

She looked at her lead agent.

"I don't know, but I placed it into the ground with a backhoe."

"Seriously, G, you operated a backhoe?"

"I needed to make certain—"

"Yeah, I get it." Sam stood next to his partner.

The workers attached the pulley system to the backhoe's huge bucket. "Ready. Steady as she goes."

With the gun safe laid safely on the driveway near the house, the backhoe's operator filled the hole again.

"Looks like I'll need to resurface the whole garage and driveway again," G said. It was a cost he expected to incur eventually, but not this soon after he buried his treasure.

"Wait. That's what looked different in your backyard," Sam said. "I knew something had changed."

"Yeah, I took out a permit for repaving my driveway, thereby concealing what I actually did."

"So you were truly undercover, undercover."

"What?"

"You had two undercover ops going at once."

"Yeah, you could say that, going rogue again is how I looked at it."

"The miracle is Hetty never once caught wind of what you were doing," Sam said. "And that means—"

"Don't get any ideas, Mr. Hanna and Mr. Callen, because I'm gonna close that loophole ASAP." She admonished them both with a pointing finger, stopped, and strolled back into the house.

* * *

_**Thank you for reading.**_


	11. Freeze

**Thank you for the reviews and for reading my story.**

* * *

**Chapter 11**

"Are you certain you feel safe staying here?" Sam asked.

"Everything is like before except those safes are no longer here."

"No, it's not. Come on. We don't know whether these hoodlums watched the entire thing."

"Okay, you're right, I don't know if they've watched us and what they saw, but I'm feeling fine about staying here alone." G walked into the living room and sat in his new favorite chair, the recliner.

"Okay, last offer to take you home with me." Sam eyed his partner.

"I'd rather be here tonight."

"See you in the morning. Remember, bright eyed and—"

"You don't need to remind me." Sam planned to pick him up early and take him to NCIS Headquarters. Hetty's orders. She insisted he be there when the safe was opened even though G told her the combination was easy. In reality, he wanted to get out of the whole deal and hoped she'd let this all slide. Not happening.

G watched his partner leave the living room and heard the front door open and close. He got off the chair and checked all the windows and doors in his house, making certain they were secured and locked. Yeah, he was a little paranoid. He remembered back to his first encounter with those men, well, the first kidnapping. His first encounter was creepier than the abduction, but he'd never tell his partner.

Next he set the alarm system to silent and tested it, making certain he only saw lights flash on the wall monitor in his bedroom.

He fixed himself something simple for dinner. Sam offered to make him a full course meal, but he wasn't hungry enough for that kind of food. With a grilled cheese sandwich on a plate, a bag of potato chips teetering on top of it, and a tall glass of milk, G maneuvered his walker back to the living room.

After settling on the chocolate brown leather sofa, he grabbed the remote and flipped through channel after channel of the most boring television he'd seen in years. Then he remembered it was Sunday night. Nothing ever happened on Sunday, well, except sports, and there weren't any games on this late at night. However, after searching through numerous channels he found a rerun of a golf tournament. G studied the players swings and putts while eating his dinner. He wondered if this was how Deeks had gotten better at his game. Maybe he bought one of those self taught DVDs. With his own BlueRay player, G could easily purchase one of those videos and learn on his oversized television. While he was thankful for Hetty's choice in furniture, he longed for the simpler days where he used his bedroll and slept on the floor and everything was less complicated.

G finished his dinner and drank the glass of milk. He tried lifting his legs and resting them on the ottoman, but failed miserably. On the next try, he opted for the only way he could get his legs up there; he grabbed the sweats of each leg with both hands and one by one he placed them on the ottoman. Tired from his weightlifting exercises, he leaned back against the soft cushions and pulled a blanket over him.

In his mind, G repeated the strokes and putts each player made on the screen before him. He closed his eyes and replayed them on an imaginary screen, mimicking the top golf stars and all of their moves. While in the hospital, G had read about this type of learning in a sports magazine and decided to try it. Only time would tell if it worked.

He yawned once and decided it was time to go to bed. G turned off the television and left the dishes for the morning. In the bedroom he chose to stay in his sweats and plopped down on the bed without pulling down the covers.

The stress of the day had wore him out more than he thought. He raised his head and checked to make sure the burn phone was on his nightstand. Right where he placed it earlier in the day.

During the night more fitful dreams haunted him. He twisted on the bed and came to full awareness. Someone was outside his bedroom window. The taller than usual window made it more secure. An intruder couldn't see inside yet he could see them. G sat up in bed and checked his attire. _Good. I'm dressed._ Again he'd fallen asleep in his clothes because he was too wiped out to change them. He slid out of bed and grasped his walker, pushing it toward the window. Right now he was glad Sam had oiled it yesterday. The dang thing squeaked like a rusty hinge on a worn out door. G peered over the window sill and glanced both directions, looking for evidence of an intruder. To his right, the side gate was open. Shivers ran up his spine.

G gathered his strength and inner resolve and called his partner on the burn phone.

"Sam," he whispered, "I think someones in my backyard." He walked around his bed and closed the door.

"Don't do anything. You hear me? I mean it this time."

"Five minutes?"

"Less than that now. I'm in the car half dressed."

"Hope you've got a weapon."

"Me too."

G heard the familiar sound of the Challenger's engine coming to life and then his partner rifling through the glove compartment.

"Yeah, I've got a gun," Sam said. "Stay on the phone with me."

G climbed back in bed and left the line open. He attempted to calm himself through some breathing exercises. But they weren't working this time. He learned them in his countless days in rehab.

"Are you there?"

G lowered his voice. "Keeping the line open and trying to calm myself."

"Okay, good idea, continue."

He set the phone on the bed next to him and started to focus on his breathing again.

The silent alarm on his security system went off. G froze and stared at the blinking lights on the wall console in his bedroom. Instead of reacting like a trained federal agent, he shrunk back and cowered in a corner of his bed, shivering and shaking. Flashbacks of his internment in that cement hold sequenced before his mind. The horrors repeated themselves in a loop. Rapid staccato breaths. Blurry vision. Pounding heart. He wanted to scream, but nothing came from his mouth. With a slacked jaw and his wide open over-alert eyes, he was paralyzed, unable to respond to the warning signs of a prowler in his home.

Footfall outside his bedroom startled him out of his frozen state. He scurried off the bed and fumbled for his weapon in the nightstand's drawer. His hands trembling, G readied his SIG-Sauer P229 E2 and pointed it in the door's direction at head height and waited.

His body wavered half from fatigue and half from the adrenaline coursing through his body. G wished in this moment that the walker was on his side of the bed. He couldn't chance moving and making noise with someone in his house and this close.

The doorknob turned.

G held his breath and kept his gun aimed at the door.

The door opened slowly and Sam peeked inside.

G released a loud sigh and lowered his weapon. He collapsed on the bed in a heap, the effort of trying to stay alert spent what little energy he had garnered from his short rest.

"You okay?"

"I am now."

Sam eyed him.

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

"I freaked out, okay, it was a short time frame, but man, I completely lost it."

"Understandable. Deer in headlights?"

"More like struck by lightning. I'm a federal agent—"

"Who was kidnapped, tortured, and held in captivity for six months."

"Now that you put it into perspective." G winked at him and sat up in bed. "So?"

"Definitely someone was here and split the scene when I arrived."

"Yeah, the side gate was open over here." G pointed to the side of his house.

"And front door wide open."

"So they _were_ in the house." He heard everything correctly and reacted, in the last minutes, as a trained federal agent would. "What now?"

"Go back to sleep and I'll stand watch."

"But you need your sleep too."

"Go to sleep."

"I get the point." G placed his gun in the nightstand along with his burn phone and laid down. Within minutes he dreamed about golfing and using all the right moves.

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_**Hopefully, the next chapters will come sooner than this one did. Thank you for your patience.  
**_


	12. Burnt Goose

**Thank you for the reviews. So far behind...**

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**Burnt Goose**

**Chapter 11**

Even though G wasn't feeling up to the trip to work, Hetty insisted on him coming to NCIS Headquarters to open the second safe. On one hand he was thankful the two safes no longer resided at his house. He hoped the kidnappers wouldn't be searching his home again, but that idea didn't pan out the way he imagined it would. During his restless sleep, he dreamed about golf and then Hetty chasing him with a weapon the remainder of it.

Inside the archive room at NCIS Headquarters Los Angeles, Sam and G sat opposite the black, double-doored, gun safe which had been excavated from G's garage floor.

"Combination?" Sam asked his partner.

"Okay, this is more stupid than the other one, your birthday and year."

"Seriously?"

"I figured if anything happened to me you'd eventually figure out both of them. And I gave you enough clues."

"Clues?"

"Remember the names on the ski masks?"

Sam eyed him and dialed in the numbers on the combination lock.

"You still don't get it? Look at the name on the safe." G thought about the coincidence, the name on the guy's ski mask was the same one on the safe. _How many times does that happen?_ The thought cycled through his mind once before he decided to snap a picture of the ski mask.

Sam shook his head. "Too simple even for me and yet a smart clue. That's probably why it went right over my head. Ready?"

"I was ready before I got shot." G grabbed the handle on the right and pulled open the door.

Together they opened the gun safe.

"I thought you said one detonator," Sam said. "I wondered why the huge gun safe."

G remembered the short time frame he had before those people hunted him down and tried to take back their property. It took slightly less than a week to come up with a gun safe large enough and sturdy enough to hold six heavy weapons. Burying it was another story and took more time than he had allotted for the task. "Yeah, well, I forgot to mention six defunct nuclear devices," G said.

"A little oversight, is that it?"

"They're defunct."

"Meaning?"

"They're missing their keyed detonators, and these guys attempted to obtain them through unscrupulous means."

"How?"

"They hinted to the possibility of using 3-D printer to replicate the detonators."

"You overheard this conversation."

"Nope, I was front and center during the discussion," G said. "After they revealed their plans, I knew I had to do something or risk the start of World War III."

"Seriously, WWIII?"

"The way they were talking I suspected they decided to use them in several countries simultaneously."

Hetty entered the archive room. "Gentlemen have you retrieved the detonator?" She peered inside the gun safe and her jaw slacked open. "What in blazes is—"

"I can explain."

"You've got more than explaining to do," she said. "Director Vance and SECNAV have caught wind of your shenanigans."

Sam covered his mouth with a hand.

"You might think this is funny, Mr. Hanna, but your partner's goose is burnt."

It was G's turn to stifle a laugh.

"Don't you mean cooked?" Sam asked.

"No, in this case I definitely mean burnt." She faced her lead agent. "I'll need a full report on my desk by noon today."

"Noon? Hetty that's only a couple of hours away and—"

"And you'll comply or you'll have to answer directly to SECNAV."

"But Hetty I'm not 100% and—"

"Get 100%!" She got in his face, admonishing him with a finger, and then she flipped on her heels and left the archive room.

"I think she's just a tad angry."

"A tad? At least she didn't rip me a new one." G guided his walker over to a chair. He sat down and removed his Surface laptop from its protective cover. "I guess I'd better get started."

"You call that not ripping you a new one? She definitely put you in your place."

"Yeah, in a hot oven and coming out burnt."

Sam chuckled. "I'll join you in a minute. Need any coffee?"

"Got any stimulates besides coffee?" G winked at him.

"Donuts."

"Don't need the sugar rush." G opened the tablet and started writing his report. Several times he nodded off and caught himself before he typed in the wrong words. Not that he couldn't correct them later, but putting in more effort required energy G sorely lacked.

Fifteen minutes later Sam entered the archive room with his laptop and sat in the other chair.

G eyed the food in his partner's hand. "Bring some for me?"

"Thought you could use something with protein." He handed G one half of his turkey sandwich.

"Oh man, this stuff makes me conk out."

"You'd better not or Hetty might threaten to do something else to you."

"I don't believe there's anything worse than having my goose burnt in an oven."

"Talking to SECNAV yourself?"

"Well, you've got a point there," G said, setting aside his Surface to eat his sandwich. "That wouldn't be my first choice." Only once in his career at NCIS had he been required to talk directly to SECNAV, and the guy wasn't exactly the friendliest man. G wanted nothing to do with another one of those chinwags.

"Personally, it would be my last choice."

"I thought you made me a sandwich before we left the house."

"It's in your refrigerator for when you get back."

"Man, I could use that right now. This half of sandwich just isn't cutting it for me."

"Want me to order something for you?"

"Lasagna."

"You're hooked on Italian?"

"Ever since I got out of that hospital it's all I can think about eating." Something about the smell of Italian spices made him hungry for lasagna. The hospital's food proved to be a horrible change in his diet. It was better than what his kidnappers had offered him each day; those torturers must've written the book on how to make someone puke by just looking at food. Every time he ate the crap they served him he gagged on it for the first five minutes before he attempted to swallow it. Not only was the taste disgusting, a cross between a heaping teaspoon of salt and the bland taste of plain oatmeal, but the smell made his eyes water.

"I think I'll order for our team and especially for Hetty."

"Think you can placate… Hetty." As usual she possessed the habit of entering a room when she was being talked about. Maybe she _was_ endowed with extrasensory perception.

"Director Vance wants to speak with you privately," Hetty said, coming closer to her lead agent.

"Right now?" He finished off the last of the sandwich and got up to follow her.

"Now you've done it." Sam smirked.

G made a face at his partner and pushed his walker after his supervisor.

She stopped near the shooting range. When he entered the room, G's jaw dropped open. He assumed Hetty meant by a secure line not in person.

"I'll be a short time with you because I know you can't stand too long," Director Vance said. "Hetty told me we won't be disturbed here." He locked all of the doors and came back to face his agent. "You were undercover when you discovered this plot yet you never put that in a report."

G swallowed hard, wishing he now had accepted Sam's offer for coffee. "Before I could even start the report I was kidnapped and tortured by their… faction, sir."

"Is it a faction, Mr. Callen?"

"For lack of a better word, sir."

"And your report will be on my desk by noon?"

"Yes, sir, I was working on it."

"I expect your research into this _faction_ to be included in that report." Director Vance flipped on his heels and left the shooting range.

G unfolded the Rollator's seat and sat down. _My goose is more than burnt on the top. It is now crispy and inedible._ Exhaustion started to set in about thirty minutes ago, and there wasn't much he could do about it. G fought with odd nightmares most of the night. Sam dragged him out of bed after only six hours of sleep.

After gaining some strength, G guided his walker back to the archive room and stood in the doorway catching his breath.

Sam looked up from his laptop. "You don't look so hot."

"I feel like total crap." He entered the room and hesitated to sit on the chair. "I don't know if I can do this."

Sam helped G into the chair. "Okay, what just happened?"

"He's here at NCIS Headquarters."

"Director Vance?"

"No, the Easter Bunny."

"And you just got called into the office, so to speak."

"Yeah, and I'm exhausted and I didn't sleep well after last night and I don't think I can—"

"Easy, man, just sit back and let me carry some of this load," Sam said. "I ordered plenty of Italian for everyone including him. Maybe that will appease the gods."

"I seriously doubt that," G said. "He wants me to research the faction, well, I called it a faction, and he wants me to confirm that it is a faction."

"Slow down."

"I can't because I have three hours to get this report finished and the research completed and I… can't do it alone."

"That's why you've got a team, G."

He sighed. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," Sam said, taking out his cellphone and dialing up their two expert researchers. "Nell, Eric, Callen needs that group, where he went undercover without me, investigated and verified as to its status, faction or some other entity."

"We've started working on it less than five minutes ago after Director Vance gave the orders," Eric said.

"What?"

G motioned for Sam to hand him the cellphone. "He's requested all of us to research this? Strange." He wondered if Kensi and Deeks were in the bullpen repeating the same assignment.

"That's odd," Nell said.

"Okay, Sam and I will start our own research." G disconnected the cellphone. "Talk about sly.

"The only way I'm going find out is to discover the reason myself ,with your help of course." In reality he understood why and now that was going to be revealed to his whole team and Director Vance. G needed to remember where the intel was in his notes. He opened his laptop and started with the information he'd gathered over a year and a half ago before going undercover. "Sam, I'm sending you my intel on these people. Two heads are better than one on this project."

Sam and G sat back in their chairs and read through the copious notes G had compiled.

After about fifteen minutes, G started to nod off to sleep.

"Hey, none of that."

"That tryptophan in the turkey is putting me to sleep."

"Don't you mean the burnt goose," Sam said with a straight face.

G smirked. "And I desperately need food," he said. "When's the food supposed to be here?"

"Around noon."

"Great. Is everything scheduled for noon?"

"Not burning your goose."

"Well, at least one thing is off the books." But only if he finished the report. With his energy level waning, the odds of finishing either one would be next to impossible without a couple of shots of coffee. "When you get a chance I could use that coffee you offered earlier."

"Not a problem. You wrote several times in your notes that you believed this group was a faction. Can you tell me what that means?"

"Yeah, they splintered off a larger organization due to a dissension in the ranks of the original group."

"Obviously, man, but I need to know what group."

"I've kept that to myself for reasons," G said. "They were good decisions at the beginning of the ops and worse toward the end of it. If I don't share the intel I think Director Vance is going to rip me a new one instead of Hetty."

"Okay, lay it on me."

G lowered his voice and leaned toward his partner. "A right wing political group."

"Okay, that's odd, especially these days."

The last time someone splintered off group, the United States Army, was Timothy McVeigh along with his two co-conspirators. "I thought so too until I discovered they both had similar beliefs except for how do deal with certain aspects of their belief system."

"You're saying these are Christians?"

"I wouldn't go that far, Sam, an off-kilter, Christian-like organization."

"You mean like neo-Nazism?"

"Not that far out either, but close." Too close for his comfort while he had gone undercover inside their loosely organized group.

"The original one?"

"Yes, and this group skewed off of them."

"Cockamamie."

"I don't think I'd put that in my report, Sam."

"Why not? Makes them sound farther out than the average faction."

"I don't think there's such thing as an average faction." G snickered.

Sam chuckled. "I dare you to put it in there."

"I hope Director Vance has a sense of humor or my goose is never coming out of that oven, and Hetty will need to call the fire department."

* * *

**_I got sidetracked with editing my memoir. Now I'll get back to this story._**


	13. Cooking Challenge

**A part serious, part fun chapter with an actual recipe...**

* * *

**Cooking Challenge**

**Chapter 12**

At exactly noon, G sat on the sofa in the bullpen, a place he hadn't seen in almost nine months, and ate his long awaited reward; a heaping helping of lasagna. After eight cups of coffee and five trips to the bathroom, G completed the report and sent one to Hetty and the other to Director Vance. He left the word Sam suggested in it because the word added character, but was certain the director wouldn't like it. It was a wait and see situation, one that added more tension to the over-the-top stressed out situation he had gotten into through his own devices.

A few minutes later, Sam joined him with his own generous serving of lasagna and several pieces of garlic bread. He offered one to his partner.

G gladly accepted another one of his new favorite foods. Well, he liked them before, but now everything tasted different. Again it was because of the intense odor from the garlic, Parmesan cheese, and parsley. He started to take notice to his newly acquired taste for anything which both smelled and tasted good. Six months in a hell hole changed one part of his life: He'd never go back to his bland concoctions that he settled for because he lacked the ability to make something more appetizing. The thought of eating instant oatmeal at work, because Sam said it was healthier than bacon and eggs, brought on flashbacks to that underground bunker. Maybe it was time to take his challenge to a whole new level.

"Deep in thought?" Sam asked.

"Enjoying the different food."

"Since when is it different?"

"I won't try to explain because you wouldn't understand, you've got no reference."

"And you do?"

"What do you think of me taking up cooking classes? Remember our last challenge."

"You?" Sam smirked.

"It wasn't supposed to be funny. If Deeks learned gourmet cooking why can't I?"

Sam shook his head and ate some more lasagna.

"You're doubting my abilities?"

"Nope. Not saying anything."

"You mean because I don't cook."

"Yes. You recite the Russian alphabet. You learn new languages. You perform great undercover work, well, most of the time."

G threatened to throw his drink at Sam. "Most of the time?"

"I'm not counting the time connected to this… trouble."

"Trouble? Why?"

"Gentlemen." Hetty hovered close to them.

G gazed into her eyes. She had a familiar look. It could only spell one thing, trouble. "Okay, what happened now?" G asked. "Don't tell me the director didn't like the report." Keeping that word in it bothered him more than he thought it would.

She said, "Everything's fine with that, but there's been another break-in at your home."

"Seriously, as soon as I'm gone those people…" G sighed, "want to destroy my house looking for the devices."

"Sorry, Mr. Callen, you're stuck here until we secure your property."

"You think they left some spying equipment behind."

"Yes, I do, well, that is according to your report and Director Vance agrees with me."

"So let's go there and find it and—"

"Come on G you've been through enough in the past couple of days."

"I'm an undercover agent and—"

"She's trying to protect her assets." Sam drew out the last word, emphasizing it to instill some humor into their situation.

G smirked. "Maybe Deeks could teach his gourmet cooking skills to me while I stay at his house."

Sam eyed his partner and snickered. "I don't know what's in that lasagna you're eating."

"What do you mean? Deeks will love having me over to his house."

"I'm afraid you're not going anywhere, Mr. Callen."

"Because Deeks doesn't want me over there?"

"Callen I'd love to teach you cooking, but we're all staying here until your home has been secured," Deeks said from his chair in the bullpen.

"You can teach me here."

"Eat. Your. Lasagna," Sam said, grinning wide.

"Still dissing my ability to learn to cook?" G faked a pout.

"You can't even boil water without scorching the pan."

"Did you have to tell the whole… world?" G sneered at his partner. He ate the rest of his lasagna and garlic toast without looking up or talking to him.

After a protracted silence between them, Sam asked, "Okay, truce?"

"Guilty conscious?"

Sam shook his head. "No, just a truce."

"You'll admit I've got talent."

"Nope. I'll never forget what happened." He chuckled.

G wouldn't forget either. Two years ago in the middle of the night, he boiled water in a pan on his stove and left the kitchen to practice a new language. Sam came over to pick him up at the designated time for a ride to NCIS Headquarters. His partner kept asking him what was cooking. He denied cooking anything and even joked about his lack of cooking skills. G was about to walk out the front door and froze. He rushed into the kitchen and turned off the gas under the blackened pan. The cooking vessel looked as if someone had taken an acetylene torch to it. G never boiled water again in fear of burning his kitchen down and maybe even his house.

"Maybe you're right." But something inside him wanted to prove himself and his partner wrong.

"I don't want to discourage you, but people have a way of repeating history."

"You made your point."

"But you're still gonna pursue this."

"It's my challenge for our next golf tournament," G said.

"Maybe you've set the bar too high for yourself."

"I have _yet_ to set the bar." He snickered.

"You finished?" Sam asked.

"Yes, but not with everything." He winked at his partner and stood. With renewed energy G decided to walk the few steps to the trash can without his walker.

Sam shot off the sofa and offered the walker to his partner.

"I'm going to do this myself."

"Okay."

"Don't say it, I've never done this before."

"Wasn't gonna say anything." Sam stayed beside his partner with the walker in tow.

G shuffled to the trash can and threw his plate and disposable silverware into it. A few more paces and he settled down in the bullpen.

Sam dropped off the walker by his partner's desk before sitting at his own.

Deeks stopped in front of Callen's desk. "I learned from videos on the internet. Check out YouTube."

G opened his laptop computer and searched for videos on cooking for beginners.

"What do you want to learn?"

"How to make lasagna like I just ate."

"There's a good project," Deeks said, coming along side Callen. "Scroll down the page to the bottom. Maybe you ought to try something easier."

"It's for the challenge and it needs to be something besides making cinnamon toast."

"Do you even know how to make cinnamon toast?" Sam asked.

G shot his partner a look.

"I get it, but I started with the basics first," Deeks said.

"The basics?"

"Boiling water." Deeks laughed.

"Is this going to be the newest joke at my expense?"

Kensi leaned in close to Callen's right side. "Don't be embarrassed. I fell on my butt, too many times to count, while learning to belly dance."

"I guess I'd have to see that to believe it," G said.

"That's _definitely_ something I would've loved to have seen." Deeks stepped back from her punching range.

G broke up their playful banter with the video he started.

_"It's easy to make lasagna," the voice on the YouTube movie said. "This is a fool proof method for lasagna. No need to pre-cook the noodles. Gently pre-cook your ground meat. Whether it's pork or beef or chicken or turkey or a combination of them._

"_You simply line the bottom of your casserole dish with your ingredients; making certain you alternate the layers of sauce, cheese, noodles, and ground meat. End with a layer of sauce and then sprinkle a layer of cheese over it._

"_Pop the casserole dish into an oven set at 350 degrees F and bake for forty to fifty minutes or until bubbly and lightly browned on top._

"_Season your meat as you pre-cook it or the sauce or both with your favorite Italian seasonings. You can add sautéed mushrooms, onions, and/or garlic._

"_An hour later, it's time sit down and eat dinner."_

G jotted down the ingredients list and the baking instructions on a note pad. "Sounds simple enough. Let's go shopping."

"Come on G, where are you gonna do this?"

"Here. There's a kitchen with an oven and a range."

"Seriously?"

"Yes, in a few hours I'll be hungry again and there's nothing else to do right now."

"Okay, but you're not gonna go to any store without your team in tow."

"Good because I need my armed security force to help me buy the correct ingredients for my challenge," G said, keeping a straight face.

* * *

**#**

* * *

An hour later, G and his team returned from the grocery store and brought everything into the kitchen at NCIS Headquarters.

Deeks left and returned with Callen's laptop.

G brought up the YouTube video on Easy Lasagna once again. "Thank you everyone for your help and now Deeks I'm going to need your guidance."

"Okay, sauté your finely chopped onions first and add the minced garlic to it," Deeks said.

"Finely chopped?" G pulled out the two massive Walla Walla Sweet Onions from Deeks' cloth grocery bag. "Where did you get the grocery bag?"

"Most any store has them."

"Need to get some of these. Kensi could you keep a list of supplies I need for my home?"

"Sure Callen." She jotted a few notes on the pad of paper Callen had given her earlier.

"Get out the chopping board you purchased."

G took it out of another bag.

"And the knife."

He removed the ceramic knife from the same bag and slipped it out of its protective cover.

"Give me the knife and I'll demonstrate on the first half of an onion." Deeks sliced into the onion's yellow papery outside and then peeled back and off the layers until the inside was visible. He sliced it in half and started cutting the onion into a grid pattern.

"Okay, this is way more complicated than any ops I've ever been on," G said. "I'm exhausted just watching you cut up that onion."

"Your turn." Deeks handed him the knife. "Finish the second half and the other onion."

G repeated the pattern he saw Deeks make on the first part of the onion. Chopping the onion happened faster than he imagined it would. In less than ten minutes, he finished both of them and placed the chopped onions into the heated frying pan with the melted butter and olive oil mixture.

Hetty came along side her lead agent and lowered her voice, "This is not what I had in mind when I said do something creative with your time."

"Learning to cook isn't creative?"

"Okay, it is." She reached up and turned the fan on above the stove. "But the whole building is starting to smell like an Italian restaurant."

"Then I'm a success." He reached for the German Red Garlic, broke it apart, like Deeks demonstrated earlier, and minced it with the special tool Deeks recommended he buy.

"Mr. Callen, you're not working at an Italian restaurant."

"I'm learning to make lasagna."

"Aren't you over doing the interest in lasagna?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"By the way, Mr. Callen, I'll need a report on your time in captivity."

G dropped the mincer and garlic on the counter-top and stared at the frying pan filled with the sautéed onions.

"I can't… no, won't write that report… ever."

Hetty cleared her throat and lowered her voice, "On my desk tomorrow morning."

He flipped on his heels and gaped at her. "That's a negative and a solid one."

"Will adding two days help you get this done?"

"It doesn't matter how many days you add, I'm not writing it. Period."

"Why on Earth—"

"Because I can't, and like I said, you won't understand."

"And you remember everything?"

"More than I would've like to ever remember." G discovered Italian food blocked the flashbacks of the putrefying food he was served in that hell hole. He released his breath with a deep sigh.

"Carry on Mr. Callen." She flipped on her heels and left the kitchen.

G stared at her as she left and then turned his attention back to his culinary endeavors.

* * *

**_By the way, the recipe does work without precooking the noodles and can be cooked in the oven or microwave. My husband (his recipe) made this and served it to his staunch Italian grandmother. She loved it.  
_**


	14. Putrid Food

**Thank you for the reviews. Here's another installment...**

**Putrid Food**

**Chapter 14**

G took his culinary skills to the next level and served his team the Italian dinner he had made. From the looks on their faces, he guessed it was a success.

"Well?" G asked. Not one comment so far and they were close to being finished with the meal.

Sam put down his fork. "It's better than the food we had this afternoon."

"And?" G came closer to him. "Still doubting my abilities?"

"My apologies—"

"Seriously, Sam, your apologies? I want a review of my culinary skills."

Deeks looked up from his empty plate. "All I can say is: When are you making the next batch?"

Kensi stopped before her plate was empty. "I'm stuffed. Can't eat another bite." She pushed her plate to the center of the makeshift table her team leader had set up earlier. "And I'll agree with Sam. Better than the food from what was once my favorite Italian restaurant. I want more."

"Now there's a review. Thank you Kens and Deeks."

"I said it was better than the restaurant's food," Sam said, eyeing his partner.

"Okay, I'll give you that."

Hetty emerged from her office and joined them. "Well, Mr. Callen, you've outdone yourself. Fabulous." She made a gesture with two fingers to her lips.

"Thank you." He bowed. "Okay, who's going to do the dishes?"

Sam scrambled to his feet and grabbed the plates, busing them to the kitchen.

Kensi and Deeks cleared and cleaned the table which was their desks, pushed together into one large surface.

G slumped onto the sofa and relaxed, allowing his team to clean up the mess.

Hetty sat next to her lead agent. "Well, that was a complete success. I'm looking for to your next culinary adventure."

"I'm wiped out after that."

Hetty lowered her voice, "You deserve a good nap after you tell me what you left out of your report."

G sat up straight. "What makes you think—"

"Something doesn't add up."

G sighed and laid against the cushions. "If you knew these men like I do—"

"No excuses, Mr. Callen, I know for a fact that you're holding something back."

"Okay, yes, I omitted some vital information which I feel wasn't needed in the report to Director Vance."

"Of all people, he's the first who should know—"

"He's the last I'll tell because it's personal." He folded his arms.

"This is about your time in captivity?"

He nodded.

"I learned a lot about them, more than when I infiltrated their group."

"I think you need to talk to someone besides your partner."

"I haven't talked to him." G sighed again. Hetty had gotten too close to the problem. She was like a tiger with prey in her mouth, unwilling to let it go until she had shaken it and it laid limp in her grip.

"You'll talk to Nate. I've called him already and he'll be here later tonight."

"But Hetty—"

"No buts, Mr. Callen, it's either that or your report on my desk in the morning." She stood and straightened her black pants suit and left.

G took off his shoes and lifted his legs onto the sofa without using his hands. A first. It had been too long since he possessed the physical strength to lift his legs without assistance.

Sam sat in the chair next to the sofa. "It take it that talk was more than just a chit chat about how much she liked your lasagna."

"What gave you the first idea?"

"She lowered her voice."

"You were close by?"

"Rearranging the desks into their respective places."

"And listening?"

"No, watching her interaction with you."

"It was the fifth degree."

"Thought so." Sam lifted his legs onto the leather hassock.

"You're not going to ask me?"

"Should I? I don't think you'd tell me anyhow."

If he hadn't done so by now, chances were he wasn't going to do it. At least that was his partner's logic. Sometimes he hated Sam's logic because it was right on the spot and this was one of those times.

"I'm taking a nap." G closed his eyes and positioned his arms over his chest.

"Sounds like a good idea."

"At least you get to go home."

"Nope, Hetty's restricted our team to headquarters."

G glanced at his partner. "Since when?"

"I just tried to leave and she told me to go take a nap with you," Sam said.

"How sweet." Maybe Hetty would allow them to venture out for the next meal's ingredients. In the next moment, G remembered the reason why and mused about what the team found at his house. Before an answer came, he was asleep.

* * *

**#**

* * *

A minute later, at least it seemed as if it were a minute later, Sam nudged him and said, "Hetty wants to see you."

G asked, "What time is it?"

"You slept for three hours."

He stood and steadied himself with the walker. G decided to leave it by the sofa and opted to use the cane. He hobbled over to Hetty's desk. Before he reached her office area, she pointed toward the corridor.

G understood what her gesture meant; Nate was here. He trudged down the hallway toward the room the team psychologist used for an office. At the door to the book lined space, he observed Nate going over some type of report.

Without looking up, Nate said, "Come on in Callen. Sit anywhere you'd like."

G hesitated a moment, slipped inside the room, and closed the door. He scanned the seating arrangement, which had changed several times in the last couple of years, and chose the chair at the far end of the room.

The psychologist pushed his wire mesh office chair back from the dark-stained mahogany desk and rose. He grabbed the report off the desk in one hand and a glass of water in the other and picked the end of the sofa closest to his desk, giving his client plenty of personal space. "Can I get you anything to drink?"

"I'm good."

"From what I read so far, you're teammates and Hetty are concerned about your odd behavior."

"What odd behavior?" He guessed his partner had raised the red flag and not Hetty.

"Well, let's see." Nate read through his notes. "An intense desire to eat and prepare certain foods."

"Is that what this is about? Seriously? Just because I wanted to learn how to cook lasagna?" G pulled himself off the low lying chair with his cane and the armrests. "Come on, this is—"

"Callen, please sit."

"I can't believe my partner would do this."

"It's wasn't only Sam. It was Hetty too."

"Great."

"They care about you."

"Wonderful."

"Please sit." Nate motioned to the chair.

G slumped down into the soft chair and sighed.

"They're worried because you've never displayed any desire to learn cooking."

"Seriously?" G kept his focus on desk, refusing to look at the man. For once, Nate was dressed casually instead of professionally. Gone was the tie he wore. Military fatigues replaced the dress slacks. It worked right now. The last thing G needed was a suit sitting to his right. "I've got this challenge going with my team. Every week we learn and demonstrate to a teammate something new to stretch our horizons and make us better agents and people."

"I know about your weekly excursions to the golf course," Nate said.

Excursions? Was Nate trying to sound sophisticated? He smiled to himself.

"Something you find amusing?"

"A private joke. I wanted to try cooking."

"Something doesn't add up, Callen. You don't even cook."

"You mean I scorched a pan trying to boil water? That's a thing of the past. I forgot about it. That's all."

"Why the sudden desire to learn to cook lasagna?"

Nate wasn't going to give up on his train of thought any time soon.

"My challenge."

"Callen, I'd buy that answer if you hadn't been through six months of captivity," Nate said. "Tell me about what happened."

"I'll write a report."

"Hetty told me you refused to do it."

Crap. G gripped the armrests with both hands, his knuckles whitening. "I can't go there, no, won't go there."

"Must've been difficult. Difficult enough that it changed your eating habits."

"Tell me about it."

"I hope _you_ would tell _me_ about it."

G released a pent up sigh and relaxed his hands. Nate's odd sense of humor had a way of getting under his skin and irritating him as if someone had deposited tiny bugs there. Talking would be the only way Nate stopped his pressure cooker stance. "They used every conceivable way to torture me."

"Food?"

"Yeah, food. A bland, putrid, oatmeal-like substance fed to me for every meal." After he spoke, G made a face while staring at the bookshelves to his left. He kept his focus on them and said, "I vowed to never eat another food like it again. If I refused to eat their food, they tied me to a chair and forced it down my throat." He shuddered, the memory of this form of torture too close for comfort. Yet he withstood it, keeping his ground and refusing to reveal the location of those devices. Countless times during torture sessions he wished for death, it would've been better than eating the disgusting crap those men pushed on him three times a day. They would never oblige him. He held a secret they needed to know.

"Callen?"

G glanced at Nate for a few seconds before turning his focus back to the bookshelves.

"Did you hear what I just said?"

"No."

"I'm sorry you endured that kind of torture."

"I'm done." He started to rise off the chair.

"I'm not."

G sighed and fell back against the squashy chair. "I'm not ready to talk to you about this."

"Your partner?"

"Never."

"In that case, you've got me or Hetty."

"Thanks for the options, but no thanks."

"Callen, it's either us or the report."

"Hetty's request?"

Nate nodded.

Great.

* * *

_**Thank you for reading.**_


	15. Catharsis

**Thank you for the reviews.**

**Here's another installment.**

* * *

**Catharsis**

**Chapter 15**

After only an hour in Nate's office, G left. He trudged into the bullpen relying less on his cane and eased down on his chair.

"Where were you?" Sam asked.

"Seriously, you need to ask."

"What?"

"You're the one who made it happen."

Sam walked over to his partner's desk. "I made what happen?"

"The mandatory meeting with Nate."

"It wasn't me."

"He said you told Hetty—"

"I told her I was worried about your sudden interest in cooking classes."

"Oh." He picked up a pen and twirled it over and around the fingers on one hand.

"Anything you wanna tell me about."

"I just told Nate."

"I see." Sam backed away and started for his seat.

"I thought you were… forget it… thanks for caring about me."

Sam faced his partner. "If you ever want to talk—"

"You wouldn't understand, okay, so I'm not going say it. We'll leave it at that." G opened his laptop computer.

"By the way, Hetty gave us permission to go shopping."

G stared at his partner. "Seriously? And now you're going to encourage me?"

"What?"

"Never mind." He lowered his eyes to the laptop and pretended to read something. Nothing was on the screen.

"Mr. Callen, a word with you."

Her sudden presence behind the lattice work surrounding the bullpen unnerved him. "If this is about leaving his office—"

"A word."

G straightened, closed his laptop, and followed his supervisor over to her desk without using his cane.

"Please sit."

"No." He refused to step up the stairs to her desk.

"If you've got an issue with me—"

"I'm not in the mood to talk about this."

"You'd better make the time. Please sit."

He stayed where he was standing. "You did what you felt you had to, and I'm not at all surprised nor… elated about your choices." G's stilted words lacked the ease he normally felt around Hetty. "I've got nothing more to say."

"You do if you want to leave this place to go shopping for your next meal."

"What I don't get is that right there? First you force me into a situation and now you're reneging on your deal." Without looking behind him, he stepped backward.

"Mr. Callen, I'm trying to apologize."

"So why don't you?" He flipped on his heels and left.

In the bullpen again, he sat in his chair and opened his laptop.

"You two got issues?" Sam asked from across the office area.

G sighed. "Same story as you."

"Ah, the same issue."

He straightened and left the bullpen. G walked around headquarters. If he could've left, he would have.

Sam caught up with his partner as he passed the indoor gun range for the second time. "Look, I'm sorry, okay, can we just—"

"Drop it already."

"But you're pissed. I know that look. I know that whole scenario when you have to walk off something I've said to you."

"I've no where to go and you want to get in my face?" G stopped walking and faced his partner. "You seriously want to go there?"

Sam held up both hands. "Truce, okay?"

"You should've thought about that before opening your damned mouth to Hetty."

"Let's go sit down somewhere and—"

"And what? Have a nice chat about me getting tortured in a hell hole somewhere in California where no one found me? Is that what you want?"

"Whoa, man, slow down, I'm not here to—"

"To judge me?"

"If you let me talk."

"Yeah, I did that and Hetty and you called in the cavalry."

"This is between you and me."

"Until it serves you in some other way."

"G, stop!"

"I wish I could, but after seeing Nate… damn… it opened up a door I would've rather kept closed."

"You were trying to control this."

"Yeah, and now it's time for damage control." G turned his back and stared into the safety-glass enclosed gun range.

Sam came along side him.

"You meant well, but…" He wiped the wetness from his eyes with the back of a hand.

"Need a man hug?"

"I'll skip the offer for now," G said. "Just walk with me." He continued to walk the inside perimeter of headquarters with Sam along side him.

Halfway through G's second round and Sam's first one, Nate approached them.

"Now what?" G asked.

"Nothing."

"You going to walk with us too?"

"If it'll help you talk some more."

"Damn. Seriously Nate? The flood gates opened up in your office. Just give me some time and I'll be in there again losing it."

Nate left them.

"He's trying to get me in there for a two hour stint." G sighed.

"You've got a lot to talk about."

"How come you didn't come find me?"

Sam stepped back.

"I had come to believe no one cared about me."

"Seriously man, no clues in order to track you."

"Yeah, no clues you could decipher."

"I'll give you that."

"I'm going to finish this by myself."

G rounded the last corner of his 'tour' and ended it outside Nate's office. He opened the door and slipped inside, closing and locking it behind him.

"Glad you could make it for another round, Callen," the team's psychologist said, without looking up from his paper work.

"Can't promise anything."

G took the same seat as before at the far end of the room.

"I don't expect anything," Nate said.

G spent the next two hours telling the man about what happened in captivity. The words flowed freer than he imagined they would. Once he opened his mouth to speak, the horror stories of his six month underground in a fortified cement bunker came forth with a flood of emotions.

Nate handed Callen a box of tissues.

G grabbed several and set the box on the table between them. "I'm not finished." Not by a long shot.

"I didn't expect you to be," Nate said. "Let's take a break and I'll see you tomorrow sometime." He went back over to his desk.

G rose and started to take out more tissues.

"Take the box."

He left with the box and stood outside the closed door for a few minutes before leaving. In the bullpen, G sat down in an empty room. He was thankful for that. After dabbing his eyes for the third time, he hid the box of tissues on the floor near the trash bin under his desk.

* * *

**#**

* * *

Early the next morning, Deeks entered the bullpen. "Ready to go shopping for groceries?" he asked.

From the leather sofa in the lounge off the bullpen, G asked, "What are we eating?" He stretched again, trying to awaken further.

"You pick."

"Spaghetti with meatballs."

Sam had slept in the chair next to his partner. "For breakfast?"

"Got a problem with that?" G asked.

Deeks jotted down some notes on a pad in his hands. "Not me. Easy enough to make."

"Maybe for you."

"It will be for you too."

Kensi came into the bullpen and yawned. "So what are we having for breakfast?" she asked.

"Spaghetti with meatballs," G said.

She glanced at her partner and then back at their team leader. "That's different."

"I thought for certain you'd say bacon and eggs," Sam said.

"I'm tired of eating the same thing every morning," G said. "And besides, I've never made my own bacon and eggs."

"Maybe it's time you learned how," Sam said.

G picked up a pillow and threw it at his partner.

Kensi caught the pillow mid air. "Okay you two, truce. I've got no problem with what Callen chose."

"Got any anti-acids on the list?" Sam asked with a smirk.

Hetty came over to the lounge area. "Here's your breakfast and lunch allowance, Mr. Callen."

"Gee, thanks Mom." Deeks opened his mouth too fast.

Hetty shot him a look.

Sam chuckled.

"That's quite an allowance," G said, fanning out the hefty wad of twenty-dollar bills. He suspected it was combined with truce money.

"More than your team spent the night," she said. "Buy and make enough for at least ten people for each meal." Hetty turned to leave and faced them again. "And take the SUV, it's fueled up." She left.

The team grabbed their weapons and IDs and exited the building through the rear door.

Sam opted to drive, leaving Kensi and Deeks for the back seat. In the rear view mirror, Sam and G took turns spying on their team members.

Deeks drew closer to his partner and they held hands.

G figured they spent the night in some secluded area of NCIS Headquarters.

At Costco, G chose a flatbed rather than a cart. Sam pushed his team around the store.

"You're getting a workout," G said.

"Yeah, and you're butt is gonna widen some more with that appetite and all that sitting around you're doing."

"Now boys, let's be civil," Kensi said, winking at them.

"Remember I'm still on leave from work."

"Between the ears."

"And you're going to need refueling after this," G said.

Sam sighed. "I'm getting your drift."

"Down this aisle," Deeks said, interrupting their banter.

Sam pushed the flatbed cart by the shelves and Deeks removed huge cans of tomato paste and stewed tomatoes.

"Next aisle." Spices landed on the deck beside the cans.

"You certain you know what you're doing?" G asked.

"It's all in my head."

"Now I'm worried." Kensi laughed.

Deeks leaned into her.

G didn't miss their gesture.

"Okay, ready for the perishables," Deeks said. This time he got off the ride and opened the refrigerator doors, piling eggs, bacon, milk, cheese, and ground turkey and beef on the flatbed.

G decided to make peace with his partner, at least for the moment. "Better get Sam a protein drink on the way home. He's earned it."

"How sweet of you," Sam said with a straight face.

G shook his head.

After checking out, Sam and Deeks loaded the groceries into the back of the SUV while Kensi kept a vigil on the parking lot around them and G sat in the front seat. Then they all piled into the vehicle.

Sam glanced over at his partner. "You okay?"

"Feeling on edge out here in the open."

"You're in the car."

"I was in my car when I got kidnapped. Remember?"

"Right, makes sense." He started the SUV and drove toward an exit.

G squinted and held a hand over his eyes. He swore he saw something familiar. Out of the corner of G's vision, metal flashed in the bright morning sunlight. "Gun!" He yelled, ducked, and pulled his weapon.

"Where?"

"To my right."

Sam stopped the vehicle with a screeching halt and drew his weapon. "Still don't—"

Shots rang out, bullets hitting the car and cracking the windshield.

Sam aimed his gun in the direction where the bullets came from and tapped G's shoulder and pointed toward the driver's side door.

G followed his partner out the door and kept low to the ground. He edged around the corner of the SUV and saw the familiar panel truck. A memory came back to him at that moment. Flashbacks blasted through his mind. With his weapon at his side, he refocused on the task at hand. Now holding his SIG-Sauer P229 with both hands, he aimed at the white vehicle. Everything happened in slow motion. All his senses heightened. He squeezed the trigger and fired his weapon.

Deeks and Kensi had piled out of the car at the same time. They covered each other and cleared the rear of the SUV, weapons drawn and firing on the truck.

More shots rang out.

Someone yelled an obscenity.

G recognized the language. Russian. He fired again and again. Then he stopped and checked his body, everywhere. Nothing. Had he imagined he was hit? He aimed his weapon again and readied it.

Sam placed his hand on his partner's shoulder. "Easy, G, they're gone."

"Did I… freeze on you?"

"Hell no, man, you did great."

G breathed out a sigh of relief. "I hit their van didn't I?"

"More than that, you wounded the driver. A deadly accurate hit."

G replaced his weapon in it's holster and slouched on the front seat.

"You okay?"

"No."

"You look as if you've seen a ghost."

"It's worse than that."


	16. Torturer

**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

* * *

**Torturer**

**Chapter 16**

G entered Nate's office and stood by the door.

The team psychologist looked up from writing a report at his desk. "Callen?"

"I need to talk." He turned around and closed and locked the office door. Without facing Nate he said, "But I don't know where to start." Instead of sitting down on the easy chair next to the sofa, G chose a wooden chair by the door. It faced the bookshelves and his previous choices for their daily sessions. "I can't stay long."

"I'll take whatever time you want to give me." Nate stayed behind his desk.

"Something happened this morning after we shopped."

"I'm well aware of the incident."

"I believed I froze, but I didn't. Right in the middle of the gun battle, I had a flashback." G shuddered, the memory from it coming back to him again. "The guy in the driver's seat of the van… I think he plays an important role in their faction… damn… can't do this." He stood and grasped the door knob.

"Try this. Lie on the floor behind the sofa."

"What?" G released the door handle. "Seriously?"

"Try something new. I think what you're dealing with is normal. Maybe one way to talk to about it is trying something different."

"I get it. I'll try anything once. Even if you suggest it." G smirked. He grabbed several cushions off the sofa and made a soft spot on the floor.

"Need a blanket?"

"I see, to hide further, this is enough."

"Remember the breathing exercises I taught you the first day."

G focused on his breathing, making it loud enough for Nate to hear him, and his body automatically relaxed. He released a long sigh.

Nate softened his voice. "Good."

"I see his face. It's the first time I met him." His breaths quickened.

"Focus on your breathing."

G brought his attention back to his breaths again. "I'm naked and hanging from the ceiling in this darkened room. I'm cold. A sudden flash of bright light floods the room and at the same moment something strikes my body." G now understood why he checked his body after shooting the driver in the van. The flashbacks of his torture caused memories to surface, making his body feel as if the beating was happening in the present time. "I hold my tongue. Keep my emotions in check. I did not want to give whomever is hurting me any satisfaction. And then he comes into focus. My torturer. He's not one of the men who kidnapped me. But I recognize him." G stopped and noticed his breathing, keeping his respirations even and relaxed. Skeptical of Nate's newly learned techniques, it surprised G that this one worked. "He's Russian mob. A notorious torturer known to permanently alter the landscapes of his victims' minds and bodies."

"Do you have a name?"

"Not off the tip of my tongue. Something like Vlad… no, longer than that. His name eludes me."

"You mind if I text Hetty with part of the name?"

"I, no… maybe… it's okay."

"It can wait."

G sat upright. "Crap!" He climbed to his feet, faster than he thought was possible. In the next minute he was outside Nate's office and dazed about how he got there.

The psychologist stepped into the doorway. "Callen?"

"A damned flashback."

"You need to come back inside?"

"Ah… no. Not now." He left Nate's office in a haze, plodding aimlessly around headquarters until he finally sat on the leather sofa in the lounge area.

From his seat in the bullpen, Sam glanced over at his partner. "You okay?"

"Nope."

Sam moved closer to his partner. "What happened with—"

"I can't talk about it, okay, just drop it."

"Done." He sat on the chair next him. "Hetty's cleared you to go home."

"Can't go there. Won't go there." He pulled his legs onto the sofa and wrapped his arms around his knees and stared into space, not focusing on anything except what he had remembered.

"Maybe you need to go back and see Nate."

"No." He leaped off the sofa. G wandered the halls of headquarters again, this time more focused than before on what he shared with Nate. What exact role that man who tortured him played in the faction, G couldn't remember. Everything about the man: his smell, his voice, his demeanor, and the very words he spoke to him reminded G of someone he had once met. That man was the missing component in his undercover stint with the faction. It was obvious to him now that he never breached far enough into their organization and that only became clear when he was kidnapped. _How could I be so wrong? _G missed a major player. He berated himself until he reached the archive room.

G hesitated in the doorway.

Hetty approached her lead agent, stepping up to his side. She sighed.

"I knew you were there."

"I didn't want to disturb you."

"But after Nate told you—"

"He told me nothing except that you had a startling revelation during your session with him."

"Oh, so we're not on the same page."

"Apparently not. Care to enlighten me?"

G trudged into the archive room and sat at a gun restoring station. Memory work exhausted him more than recovering from his physical injuries. G was thankful he no longer needed the cane. He took out his weapon and proceeded with a long overdue cleaning.

Hetty stood in front of him, watching his hands expertly manipulate the gun's inner components.

"I botched my undercover assignment," G said, without looking up from his task.

"How so?"

"I don't know how I failed to understand something so simple as…" He paused and swabbed out the gun's barrel with a cloth soaked in cleaning fluid.

"As what?" Hetty asked.

"The leadership in their faction." With a special cloth, G held the barrel and polished it to a shine. "I missed that and it bothers me and it almost got me killed. If not killed than maimed beyond being functional."

"Mr. Callen, you're the best agent—"

"And that's not good enough in this situation. I screwed up because I assumed facts based on what little information I had ascertained from my short time inside their faction."

"And when you got kidnapped—"

"Everything became crystal clear, but not right away," G said. He stood and placed the barrel of his weapon on the cleaning table. "It took me a while to understand that I had come face to face with their notorious leader. He was my torturer."

"I'm sorry Mr. Callen."

"Nothing to be sorry for… could've saved myself the whole ordeal had I anticipated, no, understood who I was dealing with in the first place. Russian mob. Those two words should've kept me from stealing those devices. But I didn't know that at the time. See, not enough information and too many assumptions." He sighed. "I jumped to conclusions. Even after writing the report about the faction to you and Director Vance, I knew something was missing. But I had no memory of what occurred in that hell hole." The desire to release the bottled up emotions from the memory of his torture brewed in G's mind and body. He stifled the urge to walk it off. G intended to utilize a different more proven method to free himself of his pent up feelings toward the man behind his protracted torture. That would have to wait until he was finished cleaning his weapon.

"We all make mistakes."

"One that can get you maimed for life? Or even killed? I don't think so."

"So tell me, who is this bastard?"

"Vladimir Volkov."

"The name's not familiar," Hetty said.

"Seriously, you don't remember this man? You of all people, I thought you'd remember the bastard. He was on our radar for years, and then he disappeared off the face of the earth."

"It's coming back to me, but it's still vague. I'll get on this right away."

"No you won't, Hetty, this is my responsibility. I caused this man's relentless pursuit of me."

"Are you certain you're ready to confront him?"

"I shot the guy and that will only add more fuel to his fury."

"At least involve your partner."

"I intend to involve him and my team. I can't take him down alone."

"Carry on Mr. Callen." Hetty left the room.

G refocused his attention on cleaning his gun. "I know you're there."

Sam strode into the archive room and dragged a stool over to face his partner and sat on it. "You gonna tell me what this is all about?"

"I wasn't ready to talk to you right after the truth about my captivity came flooding back to me."

"It started during the shootout?"

"Yeah, when I asked you how I did."

"You appeared to have had a disconnect."

"Actually." G picked up a piece of his gun and examined it closely. "It was a flashback to my time in captivity. The memory continued to come back to me in Nate's office." He grasped another piece and began the task of reassembling his weapon. "You know I've always wondered what would happen if you put one of these back together and had an extra piece."

"Seriously?"

"No, but that's what I feel like right now. I've put the memories of my kidnapping back together and I've got a left over piece."

"Unsettling."

"It was at first, but I completely get it now."

"Okay, lay it on me."

"Upstairs in OPS."

"I guess I can wait that long."

"Make sure our team is up there too."

"And where are you going to be?"

"There after I finish this and one more thing."

Sam left the archive room.

G neatened the restoring station, holstered his weapon, and followed his partner. At the last minute, he changed directions and headed toward the shooting range. After loading his weapon with blanks, he imagined Vladimir Volkov's face and body on the target in front of him. He shot the most accurate rounds of fire into the man; direct hits to the heart, the neck, and finally right between the eyes.


	17. Vladimir Volkov

**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

**And here's another chapter with loads of clues... Enjoy!**

* * *

**Vladimir Volkov**

**Chapter 17**

G climbed the stairs to the second floor of NCIS Headquarters. He hesitated in the hallway, mulling over in his mind his knowledge of their new unsub. Foiling him wouldn't be easy. He entered the OPS center.

"Eric, pull up the name Vladimir Volkov aka The Wolf, and anything you can easily find on him," G said, resting his back against the light table in the center of the room. He folded his arms. "There's loads of intel on him, so just the basic facts."

Sam joined him.

Beside their teammates, Kensi and Deeks eyed the screen and waited for the intel.

In less than thirty-seconds, pictures of the man their team leader mentioned covered the huge display.

"I remember this guy," Sam said, pointing to one image of the man on the high-definition monitor. "We lost him. Off the radar."

"Until he found a radical group to join," G said. The man had the beadiest looking, close set eyes which made him appear to be staring at people or right into them. G remembered a much old version of this guy from his time in captivity. It was obvious Vladimir didn't age well or running a faction stressed him. Their unsub towered over the other men in the photos. G guessed, from close contact with him, that Vladimir was at least six feet four inches and regularly worked out.

"Never seen this guy before. Must've been before my time," Deeks said.

"It obvious you've incurred brain damage as a result of our shopping trip." Kensi nudged him in the ribs.

Sam said, "It _was_ before his time here at NCIS."

"See? I'm vindicated." Deeks backed away from his partner.

Kensi edged closer to him and said with a sexy sounding voice, "Vindicated? Sounds like something an attorney would say." She slipped her hand under the back of his shirt.

The hanky-panky didn't go unnoticed by G. He chuckled to himself. The two of them _definitely_ spent the night together.

"Okay, let's see what you've found Eric," G said, bringing his focus back to the high-definition monitor. "A few missing links. Got anything on a current event?"

Eric faced him. "Nothing."

"Try something in construction."

"Seriously? Construction?"

G pointed to the computer behind Eric's back.

The technician whirled his seat around and faced his computer. He typed several words into a search engine.

G came up right behind the man.

Eric startled and stopped his research.

"Jumpy?"

"It's just that, well… you haven't been here in ages and—"

"Continue." G leaned over one of Eric's shoulders. "That right there at the top." He straightened.

"But it's a construction company."

"Open it."

Eric eyed G. "But…"

G gave him a look.

Eric opened the file. Pictures popped out of it all over his small screen. He transferred the mess over to the big screen and rearranged the photographs by date.

G moved closer to the display.

"You wanna tell me what we're looking at," Sam asked.

"This guy's undercover identity. Makes perfect sense." He folded his arms across his chest. "It explains the underground bunker where I was held." And Volkov's intensified interrogations as the days passed. The man had an agenda and timeline to keep.

He turned back to Eric and leaned over his shoulder again. "Bring up anything on constructing underground bunkers and the material list required to build them. Compare with possible purchases from warehouses."

"Got it." His fingers flew over the keys, entering the information for his team leader. He composed a list and sent it over to the larger screen.

"I think you're onto something," Sam said, sidling up to his partner.

"Can you map these, Eric?" G asked.

"One step ahead this time," he said, sending the map over to the screen beside the list of warehouses.

"This isn't good."

Hetty had entered the OPS Center and came along side her lead agent. "Not good at all, Mr. Callen. And you figured this out how?"

"Just playing a hunch based on my time in captivity and what I ripped off from these people."

"I'll alert the necessary authorities. Director Vance needs to see this ASAP." Hetty hurried out of the room.

The map and the corresponding list showed the possibility of seven underground bunkers in addition to the one where G was held. Shivers traveled up his spine. This was a more ominous plot than he had imagined. One of the locations concerned G the most: Right under the government of the United States' radar and it had gone undetected.

Director Vance entered the OPS Center.

Sam moved aside and the director stood between his agents.

The Director of NCIS stared at the screen with his jaw slightly ajar. "Mr. Beal, bring the one under Washington, DC front and center." The map enlarged to two times its size. "We need to find out if these people have begun this project."

"Right away, sir." Eric's fingers stroked the keys on his keyboard. "Items on the list purchased three months ago."

"Damn, this isn't the best case scenario."

"They've got a head start, that's all, sir," G said.

"Too much of one," the director said. "Do you remember if the bunker contained reinforced walls and ceilings?"

"The walls were probably reinforced. The ceiling, that's an unknown, sir. If you blasted a nuclear device through the ceiling and roof of a bunker, reinforcing it would be counterproductive."

"I'll have to agree with you there, Mr. Callen. Thank you. We'll stay in touch." He patted G on the back. "Good job.

"Eric relay this intel to SECNAV: Send drones to scan for underground bunkers around the Capitol and the White House. STOP. Exhaust all measures. ASAP. STOP." Director Vance flipped on his heels and left the OPS Center.

"Now where's the one for the West Coast of the United States," G said, thinking out loud for the benefit of his technician. "Eric—"

"On it."

G couldn't resist the urge to lean over his technician's shoulder. His stomach growled. He needed sustenance. The spaghetti never got made after the team's incident at Costco. He faced Deeks.

"How about you and I go downstairs and you teach me how to make lunch?"

"I thought you had forgotten."

"I'm starved." He leaned over his technician's shoulder again and asked him, "You hungry?"

"Well, yes, we expected breakfast."

"I'll ring you when it's fixed. And you'll ring me with the results of your search."

"Look on the screen."

G faced it and the second ominous sign of the day.

"I've got one more for you." Eric sent photos of purchasers in New York City.

"At this rate, we'll never eat lunch. Call Director Vance back to the OPS Center ASAP." G stared at the screen. New York City's business district, specifically Wall Street. Los Angeles International Airport. The Capitol and The White House. All hell had broke loose. "You might as well definitively locate the other four." He leaned over Eric's shoulder.

"Already done," Eric said, sending them to the screen.

G flipped on his heels and studied the four remaining locations. The Texas oil fields and refineries. Colorado Rockies, exact location yet identified. G suspected it was the United States' secure underground launch facilities. Detroit, Michigan. Volkov's vendetta against the automobile industry? _Bad car purchase? _He suspected it was worse; cripple the automotive industry and take the US back to the preindustrial age. Honolulu, Hawaii's military base.

G's supposed Vladimir Volkov's mission was to destroy America and any chance of it defending itself.

Director Vance and Henrietta Lange entered the OPS Center and stood next to G.

"Mr. Callen, I want to thank you—"

"Don't thank me yet," he said. "After seeing this, I'm not certain this can be stopped in time."

"What I was going to say, if you'll allow me to finish."

G nodded for her to continue.

"I want to thank you for having the courage to remember what that bastard did to you or we wouldn't have gotten this far."

"Yes, Mr. Callen, it took guts to work through those memories."

His face flushed with warmth. Good old Nate couldn't keep it to himself and neither could Hetty.

"Mr. Beale send a copy of these locations to SECNAV and tell him all armed forces need to be alerted and the President as well. Mr. Volkov is a bigger adversary than I first imagined he'd be," Director Vance said. "Tell SECNAV I'll call him after lunch." He nudged his lead agent.

G faced the light table and said, "Well, Deeks looks as if we're on mess hall duty."

* * *

**#**

* * *

Deeks opened the YouTube video and allowed G to watch it from beginning to end before he turned the whole show over to him.

"Looks simple enough," G said.

"It's fairly easy. What are you going to put together first?"

"Meatballs." He surprised himself by being able to concentrate on making lunch during a genuine crisis. This proved to G that he could fix meals for himself on his own, no matter what happened around him. The possibility of the United States' annihilation loomed over him. He pushed the doomsday thoughts aside and refocused on making his extended team the best spaghetti and meatballs they had ever tasted.

Two hours later, the homemade meatballs and sauce finished cooking in two huge roasting pots in the oven. The garlic bread smothered with butter and topped with fresh grated Parmesan cheese, minced garlic, fresh parsley had toasted under the broiler. And the spaghetti noodles had boiled to an al dente tenderness. G covered hot plates on two tiers of a huge cart with the dinner fare.

He waited for Sam to finish setting up the desks from the bullpen, this time in the center of NCIS Headquarters with enough chairs to seat sixteen people. Sam made a makeshift buffet table, at Hetty's insistence, using her desk. It was brought down next to the bullpen and draped with one of Hetty's festive tablecloths. Hetty brought out her favorite red wine and served it with lunch.

G and Sam settled down at the head of the table on one end with their plates full of spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread. Hetty and Director Vance sat at the other end. Team members took turns in shifts, sitting down at the table and eating. Deeks and Kensi joined their team and ate in silence, both helping themselves to seconds. Eric and Nell were the last to eat, having finished a marathon intel gathering campaign for Director Vance and Henrietta Lange. They lingered the longest at the table. Eric rose once during his meal to add more garlic toast and two meatballs to his plate.

G learned from his first time fixing a meal for his team: If no one made a sound they were satisfied. G scrutinized his team's faces as they ate their lunch as if he were undercover on a surveillance operation. Not one sound came from their mouths.

Tired after his two hour long meal preparation, G lied down on the leather sofa in the lounge and closed his eyes. Within minutes he was inundated with flashes of memory from his time in captivity. Overheard conversations between Volkov and the others played in his mind as if they were tape recordings. G shot straight up on the sofa and hurried over to where his desk normally was. He grabbed a notebook and jotted down words which stuck out for him. Words which he told himself he would remember no matter what happened in that hell hole. G wrote as he walked back over to the sofa.

"You okay?" Sam asked, coming over to his partner.

"Give this to Eric. I don't know what it means. I think he will though." He tore off the sheet of paper and jotted more words down on the pad of paper. When his partner stared at the paper G said, "Now! You need to do it right now!"

Sam rushed up the stairs and caught up with Eric before he reached the landing.

Eric descended the stairs faster than he started climbing them and came over to G. "Do I know what this means? You bet I do. These are the clues I was looking for. Thanks!" He left in a hurry, shouting at Nell to wait for him.

G wrote more words and phrases from those conversations. By the time he was finished, he had written ten pages of intel for his team and Director Vance. Of course, someone would have to decipher it. A whole lot of it was gobbledegook to G and that must have been caused by fatigue. He couldn't wrap his mind around the words. During his time in captivity, he was drugged and these words were heard under the influence of powerful hallucinogens. He suspected that the words were jumbled. Fortunately, G ascertained they were important. At least one quarter of the words were Russian and he had translated them. Volkov had forgotten that G understood his native tongue. Even so, those words needed to be deciphered along with the rest of them.

Now he _was_ exhausted. Before he could tell his partner to get the information to Hetty and Director Vance, his eyes closed again.

"Mr. Callen?"

His eyes fluttered open. "Hetty, sorry, couldn't help myself. These notes need to go to whomever."

She glanced at him sideways. "Notes?"

G picked up the legal pad off the floor and handed it to her.

"Okay, when did—"

"I started to fall asleep before this current nap and was overcome with a flood of memories, mostly hearing people talking. I vowed to myself that I'd remember what I heard."

Hetty flipped through page after page of intel. "Mr. Callen, do you understand what this is?"

"I don't have a clue."

"I do. Thank you." She patted his forearm and drew a blanket over him. "You get some well needed rest. I'll wake you when I've put this all together."

"I gave something to Eric as well."

"I'll collaborate this intel with his." Hetty removed the pages and handed her lead agent the legal pad. "In case you remember anything else."


	18. The Bunker

**Thanks for the reviews. Thanks for reading my story.**

* * *

**The Bunker**

G wakened to Eric's newest gadget to get the team to gather up in the OPS Center. He figured it had something to do with the case, as per usual. G recognized the balalaika, a wooden three-stringed, Russian instrument, from pictures and actually holding one years ago. That memory was faint though. Eric spent a great deal of time learning new instruments, and this one had to be a challenge even for him.

G ducked into the nearest restroom and splashed cool water on his face. Even with that, he couldn't awaken enough to focus on their next task. He repeated the water on his face a total of three times before the weariness faded enough so he could function or least appear to be functioning by his team. G dried off his face and strolled down the hallway to the stairs.

"Wondered where you were," Sam said, coming along side him.

G said nothing to his partner. The less Sam noticed his lack-luster exuberance about the case, the better.

They climbed the stairs side by side to the second level.

Before G entered the OPS Center, Sam gently grasped his forearm. It was a rare gesture his partner only exhibited during assignments of over-the-top stress. "You okay?" He released his partner's arm.

G faced him and was about to answer his partner with his classical, 'not really,' response, "Yeah, peachy."

"Just as I thought."

G entered the secure room first followed by Sam. They stood in front of the light table, their usual positions in the room, with their backs resting on it and their arms folded across their chests.

"So," Eric began.

G knew they were in for a long dissertation on the translation of the notes he had given Eric and Hetty.

Eric sighed before speaking again. "With the intel translated from Callen's notes, Hetty, Nell, and I ascertained the following." He brought up the exact coordinates of the seven underground bunkers. "Thanks to your accurate memory, Hetty and I realized those words were code for GPS coordinates."

G moved forward to exam the locations.

"The one near the White House has been deemed by the government, non-operational, after an unmanned drone destroyed it. The creepy thing about it…" Eric paused.

Those pauses in the technician's speech, though natural, frustrated the heck out of G. He imagined having a hand operated crank and winding it until Eric started up again. "Is?"

Erick glanced over at his team leader and then back at the screen. "Oh, yeah, the creepy thing about it is that the bunker was under someone's house. No way—"

"No way to find it through ordinary means without those coordinates I memorized," G said and sighed.

"Correct." He brought up the next set of GPS numbers and showed them on the huge display. "These are in order of importance as designated by Director Vance and Hetty."

G stood with his legs in a wide stance. His thighs, the strongest muscles in his body, were wobblier than he thought they'd be. It disturbed him to be this unsteady on his feet. It had to be fatigue combined with stress. Right now he wished for his cane, at least, and better, his walker. He swayed and tried to maintain his balance.

Sam brought one of the higher workstation stools over to his partner and slid it behind him. "You'd better sit before you end up on the floor."

G thankfully took his partner's suggestion seriously and sat on the stool. "This is near the ultra-secure underground missile base in Colorado."

"Correcto-mondo."

G gave his technician a look.

"Correct," Eric said, stifling a laugh. "It appears to be another house. Agents have surrounded the property and a drone has snapped pictures. We're analyzing them, rather Nell is analyzing the photographs. Next plan, detonate it and make it non-operational. Next." He brought up the next coordinates.

"Wait!"

Eric returned to the Colorado coordinates.

G staggered the short distance to the screen, and examined something odd on the picture of the house. "I know that place. Tell them not to destroy it. Get Hetty on the line ASAP!" G pushed the stool with wheels toward the exit. "Get her on the phone now!"

On the other side of the automatic doors, G lurched for the stairs, unsteady on his feet. Before the landing, he stumbled on the stairs, grasping the handrail and panting with each step.

Sam caught up with his partner. "Easy, man, you kill yourself with this stress."

"It's not stress, Sam, I… got to talk to Hetty." G tripped on the last couple of steps and caught himself before he face-planted on the floor. He half-limped across to Hetty's office, but she wasn't there. "You got to find her."

Sam came along side his partner with the walker. "Here use this before you fall down." He eyed G in the oddest way.

"What?"

"You don't look that good."

"Explain 'that good.'"

"Pale. Ghostly."

"Ghostly huh? Matches what I've seen." He pushed the Rollator through the halls and yelled for Hetty.

"Mr. Callen," she called out, rounding the corner from the exercise room. "What's—" Hetty stared at her lead agent's face. "You look as if you've seen—"

"A ghost, I know, right? You can't bomb that house in Colorado. Tell them to stop all aggressive moves. You need to…" His breaths came in heaves. He grabbed the forward handles on the Rollator and leaned over them, trying to bring in oxygen. Everything inside told him this was a panic attack, the worst one so far. Never had he been weakened to the point of collapse from one.

"You'd better sit down before you—"

"Not until you promise me."

Sam guided his partner past the bullpen and into the lounge area. He helped him sit down.

G's hands trembled and his voice quavered, "Man, I'm losing it big time over this. I can't believe it."

Hetty entered the lounge area and said, "It's done. SECNAV notified and called off any destruction of the house until I give them the orders."

"Need to go there. Now!"

"Not in your condition, G, come on, man, you're about to lose it big time and—"

"I already lost it, okay? The worst of the worst panic attacks ever. I admit it, okay? Now get me there ASAP."

"First tell us why?"

G slumped back and closed his eyes, rubbed them with his fingers, and opened them again. "I wasn't held captive in California like I thought. I was there, in that house, below ground."

Hetty's jaw dropped open. "I'll get a flight out of here with your team ASAP."

"You think there's more clues there?" Sam asked.

"I'm certain of it. I left them behind in that place."

G left more behind in that place than clues.


	19. Mt Herman, Colorado

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**Chapter 19**

**Mt Herman, Colorado**

The Lear Jet landed at the United States Air Force Academy Airfield in Colorado. The area was closest to the small town where the bunker was located. G stepped off the plane and shook his head. He needed to get the cobwebs out between his ears. Well, they weren't actual spider webs, maybe more like cotton balls. The usual stuffiness he experienced after an airplane flight was coupled with the realization he'd be entering the very bunker where he had been held captive for six months.

Three identical black SUVs waited to take their team along with Hetty and an FBI team to the GPS coordinates.

Sam came along side his partner and silently offered to help him into the second black SUV.

G accepted the hand up into the passenger's front seat.

Sam folded the Rollator walker and placed it into the back with their cache of weapons.

G sighed with relief once Sam started the engine and they were headed toward the bunker. With the map in his hands, he focused on their destination and GPS coordinates.

Every once in a while, G glanced in the rearview mirror at Kensi and Deeks, sitting closer than ever to each other. Any closer and Kensi would be on Deeks' lap. She had her hand under the front of his shirt. He had his hand on her thigh. G guessed they'd be shacking up tonight for certain. Though if Hetty had any say in it, maybe not.

All G cared about was that Kensi and Deeks had his back on this ops. Otherwise they could do whatever they wanted with each other behind closed doors.

He refocused on the GPS map coordinates. Before long G nodded off and caught himself before his head drooped down on his chest. He needed a long nap without the stress of this ops. Still he kept nodding off.

Fifteen minutes down the freeway, Sam pulled off onto a two lane road.

The road stretched out in the distance, climbing higher with each mile into the mountains and the Mt. Herman area.

"Got the coordinates punched into the on-board GPS yet?" Sam asked.

G startled fully awake. "Ah, no." He leaned forward and entered the coordinates.

"After this, you and I are taking at least a two week vacation," Sam said.

"How sweet," Kensi said, winking in the mirror at them.

"In separate rooms." Sam winked back at her.

"What? No bromance for you two?"

G leaned over the back seat. "If you two get any chummier, we'll have to separate you into different SUVs." He chuckled and turned his focus back on setting the coordinates.

"Touche, G."

'Take Mt Herman Road to an unmarked dirt road on the left,' the on-board GPS system announced.

"Saved by the computer," Deeks said.

"Not much is saved with the way you two are going at it," G said, keeping his eyes focused on their forever increasing heavy petting.

"You need to get a girlfriend, Callen," Kensi said.

"I've got one."

Deeks laughed.

G shook his head. "Not the one you're thinking of."

"You mean the tall, dark, and handsome one?" Deeks asked.

"You'll get yours for that comment," Sam said.

"Want to challenge me at a game of big boy golf?"

"You'd better quit goading him," G said.

"Remember, I won last time," Deeks said.

"Okay, yeah, you did. You beat us all."

"They got some great golf courses around here," Kensi said. "One on the air force base."

"And a challenge is forming in their minds…" G said. "It's dangerous around here."

The SUV in front of them screeched to a halt on the dusty road. Sam pulled up short behind it. And the rear SUV stopped.

The FBI team piled out of the cars and their team leader came over to G's window.

"As far as we can ascertain, we're safe going on foot from here out," their team leader said.

G turned to Sam.

"You okay with that?" Sam asked him.

"I think I can make it," G said.

They climbed out of the car and opened the back of the SUV. Everyone grabbed as many weapons as their bodies could carry. Kensi loaded herself down with a sniper rifle in addition to body armor and plenty of ammunition. Deeks followed suit. Sam removed two suitcase-like gun cases and shouldered several magazines of ammunition.

G stared into the empty trunk. "I can—"

"No, man, Hetty's orders, remember? You let us carry the load," Sam said.

G patted his back, feeling for his weapon. "At least I've got one gun." He eyed the folded walker. Before he rejected taking it along, an FBI agent reached into the back and took it out, hoisting it over a shoulder.

The two teams hiked through a stand of conifers which covered the immediate side of the hill. Next they traversed rugged terrain ascending a steep hill before coming to a perch over the house in question.

G observed his partner observing him. Sam acted liked the typical mother hen whenever G had physical or mental problems. G needed the extra concern over his well being and accepted his partner's constant vigil since they left NCIS Headquarters. Even on the flight over to Colorado, G was under the watchful eye of Sam. Hetty had given the order. G understood what that entailed from his partner's perspective; every movement, every spoken word, and every odd look brought Sam's scrutiny. G took the binoculars his partner offered to him and got belly first on a hillock overlooking the house. He studied the house for movement.

Sam crouched beside him. "Confirmed?"

"Yeah, this is the place."

"Anybody home?"

"So far it's clear."

The lead FBI agent moved closer. "That's what the drone told us on the last report."

The compound below consisted of ranch style house with an attached garage and three outbuildings. The FBI chose the outbuildings to investigate and NCIS's team chose the main house. They creeped down the hill under the cover of conifers and heavy underbrush. Halfway down the hill, Kensi signaled to her team that she would take her position, lying on her belly and aiming her sniper rifle at the front door.

Sam volunteered to be the decoy. He strolled up to the front door and knocked on it, of course sans any ammunition and weapons, except his gun on his back. After G was satisfied that the front was covered, Deeks and him came around to the back door. On the way they peeked into the garage and noted the absence of vehicles. None in the the driveway. The place was deserted.

Sam spoke into his comm link. "No answer. Knocked three times."

"Keep trying," G said. He and Deeks rounded the corner of the garage. The entire yard was stacked with weapons. "I guess we didn't need our stash." They were out in the open. "Someone's expecting to start a war. I'd say enter the house, Sam, and make some noise. We've got an arsenal out here." He heard a loud crash in the comm link. Sam had made noise. G guessed his partner had knocked the front door off its hinges. It's one thing, when given the opportunity, Sam loved doing on an ops.

After picking the lock, G entered through the back sliding door followed by Deeks. The ground floor was foreign territory for G. He never remembered being up there. G tried to picture in his mind where the bunker stairs were.

They met Sam halfway through the house.

"Got a clue?" Sam asked.

"Garage?"

Sam took the lead into the space and scanned the room with his flashlight. "Lights?"

G found a light switch and flipped it. Flood lights blinded his eyes. He shrieked and dropped to the cement floor.

"Easy, man," Sam said, "it's a memory. It's only a memory and it can't hurt you." He helped his partner to his feet. "I think I found the way into it. You ready for that?"

"I'm freaked out, okay, and I don't know if I can… do this."

Sam led G by the forearm over to a huge trap door in the floor.

G stared at it. His knees shook hard. "Damn. I never thought it would be like this."

"Take my hand."

G shot him a look.

"He isn't going to razz you, will you Deeks?" Sam eyed their team member.

"Scouts honor. I'd be freaked out too."

"Ready?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, I guess."

Sam grabbed one side of the trap door and Deeks the other. They pulled back the heavy steel door and latched it open with zip ties.

Sam approached his partner and reached out to take his hand.

G backed up fast. "No!" He shrieked. His eyes darted back and forth, scanning for his perpetrator.

"Easy, man, come on, it's Sam."

G stopped backing up and glanced at the entrance into the house. Hetty stood there. She had to have seen the whole thing, the look on her face told him that.


	20. Certifiable

**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

**For those of you who are G whump and hurt/comfort fans, this chapter will satisfy some of those cravings.**

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**Certifiable**

**Chapter 20**

Hetty eyed her lead agent and in this case it was Mr. Hanna. "Carry on," she said, flipping on her heels and allowing the garage door to close behind her.

G trudged forward and peered into the dark hole. A wide staircase led below into his worst nightmare.

"You okay?"

"I'm better since she left," G said.

"You thought she was gonna rip you a new one about losing it?"

"Something like that." It was worse than that. He believed Hetty would discover what was really wrong with him.

Sam sighed and lowered his voice. "She knew you'd get triggered by familiar surroundings."

"Talk about a mother hen."

"Now you've got two of us watching your back."

"I can't go down there alone."

Sam offered a hand to his partner again.

G took it this time and attempted to keep his hand steady. Not happening. His whole body trembled as if controlled by an outside force. He stepped down into the bunker and stopped near the bottom.

"I can't do this."

"Remember what Nate taught you in your sessions with him."

"How do you know what Nate taught me?"

"He told me too."

G caught the glint in his partner's eye. Sam talked about the time he had been buried underground. Maybe that trauma was like this. Maybe not. G focused on his breathing, keeping his breaths under control. But the moment he thought about moving forward his respirations came in shallow, rapid succession.

"Focus," Sam said. "Close your eyes."

"Screw that idea!" G started to back up the stairs. Closing his eyes brought on one thing he wanted to keep at bay; memories of his time down here.

"Stop!"

G pulled backward, trying to get Sam to release his hand. "Let go!"

"Nope. Try sitting down for a few minutes."

G sat on the second to last step.

"My flashlight is gonna go dead in a few minutes. I'm gonna turn on the lights."

"No!" G remembered exactly where the light switch was in the bunker and what the result was.

"What?"

"Can't handle it."

"Isn't much you can handle," Sam said. "If you don't move forward, you'll be stuck in the past forever."

"Sounds like something Nate would say."

"It's something Nate said to me years ago."

"And?"

"I moved forward, but I still carry baggage with me."

"Now how does that work?"

"It lessens each day."

G stood on wobbly legs. "I need to do this without holding your hand."

"Just as long as you don't think you're gonna run up those stairs."

G looked over his shoulder. Deeks kept a vigil at the top of the stairs. "He's not going to let me out of this." He faced his partner. "Is that it?"

"You got it." Sam released his partner's hand.

G sighed and stepped down into the bunker. He pointed his flashlight in the direction of the room where he had been tortured. "Okay, I guess we're going to need those overhead lights." G braced himself against the nearest wall, back against it and bent over at the waist with his hands on his thighs. He waited for the reaction which he had experienced too many times to count.

"Ready?"

G nodded and prepared his body and mind for the inevitable. The hallway flooded with bright lights and he screamed and tightened his body, waiting for Volkov to drag him into the torture room. Nothing happened. He held his position against the wall in spite of trembling legs and flashbacks.

"Come on, man, breathe."

He focused on his breaths, trying to keep them steady and normal. Yet the minute his focus wavered, his breathing changed to rapid, short respirations.

Sam sidled closer to his partner. He placed a hand on G's right shoulder.

"Crap! No!"

"Easy, man, slow down your breathing, that's it."

"Can't keep it like this and go anywhere or think… can't do anything."

"Then we stay here until you can."

"You can't be serious. That could take… hours, even days or…" G's body relaxed.

"And you were saying…"

"I left part of myself down here in this hell hole."

"Which part?"

G refocused on his breathing before talking again. "The part that lost it."

"What did you lose?"

"Come on, Sam, I'm a different person."

"Not to me."

"Seriously? Since when did I want to learn how to cook and bake?"

Sam sighed. "You mean your overcompensating tactics?"

"What?" G glanced sideways at his partner. It was the first time his gaze left the floor since Sam had flipped the switch.

"It's not natural for you and that's why you're doing it."

"I'm lost. What are you saying?"

"Cooking and baking helped you avoid this reality."

"I'm hear aren't I?"

"And what did it take to get you here?"

"Crap!" G started for the stairs.

"He's up there with orders to keep you downstairs."

He grasped the handrail and faced his partner. "How?"

"Any means possible."

G hated the sound of those words. They reminded him of Vladimir Volkov threatening his emotional and mental sanity. He shuddered. G sat on the stairs again. "I'm not cut out for this."

"You were doing fine."

"Yeah, until the problem with needing to cook and bake arose."

"Well, I didn't bring it up, you did."

"So I did."

Determined to see this ops through to completion, G climbed to his feet again. He figured out that _he_ was the ops. G trudged down one hallway and stopped midway between the stairs and the torture room. With one hand on the wall, he steadied himself again.

"I don't have to go there to know what I lost."

"Correct, but you've got to tell me what you think you've lost."

"Huh?"

"I've ascertained that you've never lost anything."

"That's a lie. I did Sam, can't you see that I'm different."

"Nope."

"I'm different. I've changed. I feel it deep within me."

"Tell me what's altered within you."

G sighed. Each minute which passed created a deeper level of frustration inside him.

"Are you blind?"

"Nope."

"Stop saying that damnable word!"

"Nope."

"Stop it! Stop being so logical. It's unrealistic. I lost it. Okay, I damn well lost it."

"Vladimir broke you?" Sam asked. He leaned against the cement block wall opposite his partner.

"I caved."

"So you revealed the whereabouts of the nuclear devices?"

"Hell no! What kind of agent do you think I am?"

"Then he didn't break you."

G released a pent up breath. "You're pissing me off."

"Good, maybe you'll see the light." Sam glanced up at the bright halogen light fixtures.

"Is this supposed to be some kind of cryptic message for—"

"It's supposed to be giving you the idea that you didn't lose anything."

G pretended to not hear his partner. He stretched out the kinks in his neck and shoulders and plodded down the hallway to that abominable room. At the doorway, he hesitated and stared into the space. His whole body trembled as if it were a quaking aspen blowing in the wind. His rapid, short breaths threatened to bring the familiar feelings of a panic attack with uncontrollable sweating and panting. He focused on his breathing again, willing himself to slow down. It wasn't working. G pushed himself forward. He inched toward the spot in the floor with a hand on the cold cement wall to steady his steps.

Nothing in the room had changed since his time in captivity. Heavy chains still hung from the ceiling hooks. He cringed within seeing the open drain in the floor. It doubled as his bathroom and the place where the blood dripped off his beaten and raw body. And the place where he involuntarily released his bowels and bladder after becoming terrified. Too terrified.

Soul death, that's what Vladimir promised and fulfilled.

Sam stood beside his partner. "You okay?"

"As you're so fond of saying, 'nope.'"

Sam shook his head. "I guess I had that coming."

"You guess?"

"Don't avoid."

G brought his attention back to the open drain. It was symbolic for him. Everything lost down that black hole into the earth. "I lost myself here." Even to himself the words lacked feeling.

Sam kept his voice soft to match his partner's tone. "What part of you?"

"I broke down."

"You didn't."

"What the hell are you trying to prove!?"

"I'm trying to show you the truth."

"You've pissed me off again! I caved. I lost it. I'm not the same person I was before…"

"You are."

G flipped on his heels, almost losing his balance, got in his partner's face, and shook a finger at him. "What's with you? Are you deaf? Didn't you hear me? I said—"

"You told me something that's a lie and I'm here to refute it," Sam said. "Breaking down implies losing it to the point of revealing intel."

G stepped backward. "Okay, semantics."

"Nope."

"There's that damnable word again."

"Seriously, G, this is not semantics. This is reality. Either he broke you and you became a blithering idiot, telling him everything he wanted to know or?"

"Or what?"

"Or something altogether different occurred."

G faced the open drain again.

"Does that drain hold a significance for you?" Sam edged closer to it.

"Don't go over there!"

"Why? What will I find here?"

A few more steps and his partner would be standing a foot from it.

"Sam! Stop!"

"Tell me or I'll move closer to it."

His lips trembled and tears welled up in his eyes. "I broke down and I…"

Sam lowered and softened his voice. "And what?"

"I cried. I couldn't stop crying. I begged him to stop torturing me." With the sleeve of his black, long sleeve t-shirt, G wiped away the tears streaming down his face.

Sam faced his partner. "Why didn't you come to me and talk about this?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"I wouldn't understand breaking down and crying?"

"Nope." It was G's turn to shove the hated word in Sam's direction.

"Touche."

"Thought is was appropriate."

"You told Nate?"

"Hell no! You're the first person I've told."

"I broke down like that while buried alive with my buddy."

"You? Come on, you?"

"Yeah."

"And you're perfectly normal."

Sam winked at him.

"Okay, I think I get it. I'm perfectly normal too. But I don't feel normal. I feel as if I left part of me down here."

"He wanted you to believe you lost it. He wanted you to believe he broke you."

"Why?"

"It's called psychological warfare, mental torture, and when someone succumbs to it they're more likely to reveal the intel the perpetrator sought in the first place."

G backed up until his body came in contact with the cold cement wall.

"So I'm not certifiable?"

"What? You thought you were certifiable?"

"Yeah. I mean, what kind of federal agent would I be if I broke down in tears under pressure?"

"You weren't under pressure, man, he tortured you anyway he could. There's a considerable difference."

G mulled over Sam's words in his head and finally his heart. The heart part was the difficult area of healing. Everything inside told him he was certifiable. He had come close to quitting, believing that nothing could help his emotional and mental states. Not once had it occurred to him that Vladimir Volkov planned the whole scenario. He straightened from his hunched over position against the cold wall.

"You're right Sam, I jumped to conclusions about my emotional and mental well being."

"Call it Stockholm Syndrome. It's something I didn't deal with during my time underground because there wasn't a megalomaniac hovering over me and torturing me."

"You're saying I bonded to that bastard in some way?"

"Yeah, unfortunately."

"Another wonderful piece to this torturous puzzle called captivity."


	21. Oh Rats

**Thank you for your patience and the great reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

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**Oh Rats**

**Chapter 21**

G started back toward the stairs.

"Wait, we're not finished."

He stopped and faced Sam. "What now?"

"Anything you remember besides what happened to you?"

G rested against the cement block wall with his hands behind his back.

"Can't think of anything."

"You said you left something here."

"Yeah, me."

"Ah, missed that subtle communication."

G left the torture chamber and hesitated by one room to his left. He stared into the darkened space.

"Missing something in there?" Sam observed his partner's body and eyes.

"Maybe."

G disliked his partner's scrutiny of his every action and reaction. It must've been Hetty's orders. Any more diligence from him and he'd be their lab rat. He glanced sideways at Sam and stepped into one of the three partitioned off cubbyholes, his flashlight flooding the darker corners of it. For some reason, he couldn't remember why the lights failed to work in this room. There was a specific reason. He backed out of the one cubbyhole and entered the next one which was twice the size.

A single wooden table, the size of a student's desk, stood near the back of it.

G focused his flashlight's beam on the table's surface. He gasped and stepped backward right into Sam.

"See a ghost?"

"Something like that."

Sam stayed put and brought the beam of his flashlight down on the table's surface.

G sidestepped his partner's body and backed out of the room into the hallway, his flashlight still pointed at the table. He shivered and tried to remain calm. His right arm trembled causing the flashlight's beam to bounce up and down along the back wall of the cubbyhole.

Sam faced his partner. "You're remembering something?"

"Yeah. I wish I forgot about this, but seeing the inside of it and the table… did it to me."

"Need a man hug?"

"Earlier I would've gladly accepted, but now I just need to get out of here."

G started for the stairs again. Instead of going up them, he veered right down another hallway.

"I'm remembering something all together different."

He paused at the end of it outside a closed and locked steel door.

"Got to be a way to get in here."

"Step aside," Sam said, his gun drawn.

"Besides shoot 'em up." G smiled.

"Think this is funny?"

"Nope." He paused for emphasis of the disliked word. "It's just that you usually go for the most boisterous version of entering a room."

"See a key?"

G couldn't resist the temptation. "Nope."

"Guess I had that coming again."

G moved away from the door.

"We don't know what's in here. What if you firing upon the door sets off an explosion?"

"Or something worse?"

"Yeah."

"Step aside."

G backed up the way he came until he was at the end of the hallway before it turned toward the stairs.

"Nervous much?" Sam laughed and stepped backward, halfway down the hallway.

"Tell me you're not moving away from that door before you—"

Sam fired two shots at the padlock. The steel door blasted open, ripping it off its hinges, tearing it to shreds, and slamming Sam down on the concrete floor.

G edged forward and checked out his partner, offering him a hand. "You okay?"

Sam took it and climbed to his feet. "I am now." He brushed the cement dust off his black clothes and cautiously moved toward the open door.

"See, what did I tell you? Always going beyond what is needed in every situation." G smirked.

"Glad you're back to razzing me."

"You took the edge off everything with your door-blasting routine."

G climbed around the twisted and broken metal pieces which once was a heavy steel door. "This gives new definition to the term blast door." G laughed. He hedged around the corner and peered into the room. But it wasn't a room like the last one with the cubbyholes. "Must've been rigged with explosives." Rather it was a tunnel which continued on into the darkness.

"Yeah. Let me go first," Sam said.

"Oh, that's right, you've got to protect your 'ops.'"

"That's gonna cost you." He edged out in front of his partner.

G followed close behind Sam's footsteps. "You think this comes out near the outbuildings?"

"Nope."

"Back to that again?"

"Nope." Sam hushed his partner with a wave of his hand.

G came along side Sam in the middle the long underground tunnel which steadily and slowly climbed upward. "I doubt if the cellphones work in here."

"Quiet."

G snickered and whispered, "Hear something?"

"Maybe it was just rats."

"Oh rats…"

G sniffed the air. He covered his nose, trying to breathe in fresher air. It wasn't working. "Smells like rotting meat down here."

Sam and G edged forward, both of them stopping at the same time every couple of feet. They moved in the exact way they were tuned into each other on an ops, in sync. One hundred feet down the tunnel lined with stainless steel, they abruptly halted and stared at the source of the noise.

G covered his mouth, flipped on his heels, and was about to run the other direction.

Sam grabbed his partner by the back of his shirt and held him in place.

"I'm going to be sick."

"You're not leaving the tunnel."

"I won't, no, can't go past that…"

A man's partially decomposed body had been consumed by rats. The rats scurried away into the darkness.

"I need you to stay right here," Sam said, keeping his voice low.

"Can't stomach the stench."

"Then come with me." Sam released G's shirt.

He faced Sam and spied over his shoulder at the gruesome scene beyond him.

"I don't know if pinching my nose is going to help."

Sam took out his gun and eyed it. "I suggest you do the same."

"After I pass by the… it… I'll take out my weapon."

Sam glanced sideways at his partner. "What happened in that other room?"

"When we get through this I'll think about telling you," G moved forward, "the operative word is think." He pinched his nostrils shut and sidestepped past the half-eaten man.

"I wonder…"

"I know what you're going to say." G hurried along the corridor, creating distance between him and the stench. He released his nose and attempted to breath in fresher air. The fetid odor was stronger in this end of the corridor. "You wonder why that triggered me. Right? I'll tell you later."

"You've got a lot to tell me later."

They continued down the tunnel side by side, keeping silent.

About a hundred feet in the distance a single light hung from the domed ceiling.

G inched closer to the curved wall and drew his weapon.

"Something tells me you've been down this way before."

This time G pressed a single finger to his lips and pointed to the wall opposite him.

Sam hugged it.

Twenty feet from the light, G paused and shot out the bulb.

"Now why in the—"

Gun fire erupted beyond the light bulb.

"Let's go back the way—"

"No!" G rushed forward, firing his weapon and not thinking about the consequences.

In the distance a man yelped. Another man screamed, "Stop."

"Turn the lights on and put your hands in the air," G said, approaching the area where the voices had come from.

In a clearing about twice the size of the room divided into three cubbyholes, two men stood with their hands in the air. Blood dripped from the side of one man's forehead. The tallest man's shoulder bled and his jaw dropped open.

"You again!" he said, edging forward and readying himself to pounce on G. He backed away when he saw the weapon in his hand.

"Different circumstances." G eyed his partner.

Sam performed the dirty work, zip tying the men's wrists.

"What happened to your guy?" G motioned with his head over his shoulder.

"Oh him? He doubled crossed us." The tall man kept speaking.

"Well, that's par for the course these days, especially with _your_ faction." G laughed at his own bad joke. Someone needed a sense of humor in all of this.

"He was an infiltrator like you," the same man said with a snarl.

G ignored the look and kept questioning him. "From?"

"FBI? CIA? Or maybe from _your_ _faction_, NCIS?"

Sam interrupted the tall guy's conversation with his partner. "You gonna be okay here with them?"

"Don't tell me you're going to take pictures of that…" He couldn't bring himself to say the words. "Go." He nodded in the opposite direction.

"Need an ID." He hurried back down the way they had come.

Less than five minutes later Sam returned.

"Well, does he belong to us?"

"Nope."

G shot Sam a look for using that word.

"He's NSA."

"You know him?" G asked.

"Hell no, I recognize him though from a missing agent in action alert."

G sighed. "Move it." He signaled with his weapon for the two men to continue toward the end of the corridor.

Sam came along side his partner, matching his pace and training his gun on the two suspects. He whispered to him, "You know these two guys?"

"Yeah," G said, refusing to keep his voice lowered. "They kidnapped me."

"The plot thickens."

"Seriously, Sam?"

"Would you rather have me say that's par for the course?"

"Nope." G kept a straight face.

Sam shook his head.

"Tit for tat."

The men reached the end of the tunnel.

"Push on it."

"Hell no, there's agents out there," the taller man said.

"Good." G shoved his gun into the tall guy's back. "Do it now!"

Both of the men pushed their bodies sideways into the steel door, opening it up to a clearing near the outbuildings.

"There they are!" One of the FBI agents aimed his gun at the two men.

Nine more agents swarmed the clearing with high-powered weapons drawn. They took the two men into custody, adding handcuffs to their wrists in addition to the zip ties.

Hetty came into view a few minutes later. "Gentlemen." She eyed her two agents. "You okay, Mr. Callen?"

"On one account."

She glanced at him sideways.

"I no longer have to smell that rotting man in the tunnel."

"Seriously, G, is that all you're good on?"

"Okay, there's more, those two guys kidnapped me."

"The rotting body is an NSA agent who was undercover with this faction," Sam said.

"Had to be after me because he doesn't look familiar." G smirked.

"Seriously, again? He doesn't look familiar? He's got no face."

"He had a face, Sam, it was covered with rats."

"You've lost it."

"Nope."

Sam shook his head. "That too?"

"Yeah, that too." G found a bench under a shade tree near the outbuildings. "I could use a cold beer right about now."

Sam sat next to him. "And one huge debriefing."

"That can wait. I need something to drink."

Hetty brought the two of them bottles of water.

G looked at the container. "Man, this beer is kind of pale. Must be bleached by sitting in the sun too long." He unscrewed the lid and drank about half of it.

"You mean like your brain?"

"Come on Sam, you need to relax and have some fun."

"Really?"

"Yeah, seriously." He finished off the water bottle. "I still need that beer. Besides I've been underground with my kidnappers, a rat-faced man, and two torture chambers. I doubt if I've been in the sun too long."

"Need your walker?" Sam asked deadpan.

"Nope." G stood and trudged toward their SUV. "I see a vehicle with my name on it."

"Are you gonna just let him sidestep all of this, Hetty?"

"You heard him," she said, "it's time for a beer."

G stopped, flipped on his heels, and looked at the two of them. "I promise you, Sam, that you can pick my brain—well, maybe not quite the right words considering what I just saw down there—after I've had a couple of beers." He sighed. "I need a break after going through all that. Remembered too much and saw too much."


	22. Rogue Venture

**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

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**Took some well needed down time... Between two projects, I wrote close to 50,000 words in two weeks. Phew!**

**Here we go... **

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**Rogue Venture**

**Chapter 22**

G plodded to the SUV and climbed inside the backseat.

"Who's driving?" G asked Kensi who was sitting in the front seat.

"Hetty."

"Seriously? I think I'm in the wrong—"

"No, Mr. Callen, you've got the right vehicle," Hetty said, sitting in the driver's seat and buckling her seatbelt.

Sam climbed into the backseat next to his partner.

"Where's Deeks?" G asked.

"He's coming." Kensi pointed to their left.

Deeks opened the tailgate and hopped into the back with all the weapons.

"I figured we'd all go play a round of golf after we've got a couple of beers under our belts," Hetty said, taking the car out of park and heading back down the mountain.

"You play golf?" G asked.

"Don't think I can beat you four?"

"Seriously, all four of us?" Deeks asked.

"I realize you're the champion, Mr. Deeks, but that doesn't mean someone can't play better than you."

Asking Hetty to play golf with them never crossed G's mind. The game built camaraderie for their team and G figured she wasn't interested.

A half hour later, Hetty stopped at a pizza parlor.

Both teams, the FBI and NCIS pulled up to the small pizza joint. The FBI took turns watching their prisoners.

G and Sam found a booth which only fit the two of them.

G was thankful their whole team and especially Hetty wouldn't be able to squeeze into it. He ascertained that his partner wanted to pick his brain about what occurred outside that second room.

"Okay, now that we're alone let's talk about what happened in the bunker."

"I thought you were going to ask me that," G said.

"Well, what did you expect? After I saw how you acted down there, especially in the corridor with those two men and shooting out the light, I was worried about you. You acted like a lone wolf."

"It's what happened in that room with the cubbyholes. And seeing it again reminded me of everything that occurred down there. I knew that man."

"The NSA agent?"

"Yeah."

"Then you lied to me."

"Sort of and sort of not. I tried to tell you, but you argued with me. So I shut it down. It's hard enough talking about what I saw, what I was forced to see, forced to do, force to… see, can't even tell you now."

"One step at a time."

"I watched him dying right before my eyes. They tried to use his torturous death to get to me, but it didn't work. Instead it make me crazy inside, I thought I was going nuts.

"I wasn't ready to tell you about it. It was just too gory. And when I saw him in the tunnel it brought everything back to me, what they put us both through in that other torture chamber with the cubbyholes. For me, that was the worst thing that ever been through in my whole career. I can't get the images out of my mind. I can't stop thinking about what I saw and what they did to him and what they threatened to do with me.

"They tied me to that desk and smeared my arms with rat guts. I almost puked before they finished applying it. They tied the NSA agent to a chair in front of me. He was smeared with ground up raw meat. My two kidnappers left us. Minutes later the door opened and rats ran into the room. These huge rats crawled all over the NSA agent biting him. He screamed and writhed in pain, and he tried to get them off him. The rats ate his hands and body and finally his face. I kept believing I would be next. There must've been some kind of repellent on me even though I had the rat guts on my arms. It terrified and disgusted me all at once. My mind played the pictures of the NSA agent's torturous death again and again. I don't believe I ever will ever get over them."

"I think you need to debrief with Nate. You really need to talk to somebody about this that has more knowledge about being in a situation like that. I mean you can bounce stuff off me, but I think you need more than that."

"I'll agree with you. I got some other things going on also."

"I think I know what you mean. Like wanting to kill Vladimír?"

"For starters."

"Well, in that case, you absolutely need to speak with Nate."

"He isn't here so that's not happening right now."

Hetty came up to their booth. "Gentlemen, you need to take this some place else."

"I'm finished," G said, standing.

"Come on, man, sit back down."

"Nope." He eyed his partner, seeing if he got his drift. "What's the matter? Are the details too gory for the type of restaurant?" In that moment, he finally understood the desire to eat Italian food. The redness of it blocked out the gruesome details of the NSA agent's death. The pungent odors of oregano, basil, and garlic took away the putrid smells of the decomposing agent in the corridor. It wasn't the rotting food they forced him to eat. G cringed, seeing flashes of pictures in his mind's eye.

"Why don't you and Mr. Callen debrief in the car."

G got her drift. He plodded to the door not looking back to see if his partner followed him. G leaned against the SUV's front bumper, staring at the SUV holding the two mean who kidnapped him.

Sam came along side him and looked in the same direction.

G folded his arms.

"Okay, what's going on?"

"I need to get him and this isn't doing that."

"You're not in the right mind set, plus we don't know where he is."

"Don't care. I'll find him."

"You going rogue on me?"

G walked away from his partner and climbed into the front seat of the SUV.

"Is that your answer? Should I tell Hetty we've got a problem?"

G stared out the front window.

Sam closed the passenger door and left.

As soon as his partner was out of sight, G slid over into the driver's seat and searched for the second set of keys he knew had to be there. A few minutes later he located them in a metallic case under the front seat. He started the engine and left the pizza parlor's parking lot.

**#**

G checked into a hotel and took a long shower. As if a shower could wash away the images and stench of that NSA agent sitting in the corridor. He lived with it this long, and it wasn't leaving his mind anytime soon.

He donned a bathrobe and used the computer he borrowed from the hotel. With a memorized code, he accessed a secured research site and started looking for Vladimir Volkov. Three hours into his search, G discovered movement on the GPS he had planted on the man almost nine months ago. The bastard was all his now. It was his last farewell to the worst torturer he had ever met in his life. If Vladimir ever released him, G vowed to search the world over for him and shoot the man's ass full of bullets. Torturing the bastard wasn't too good for him. Buck shot in the man's ass, now that sounded perfect.

He waited until it was dark outside and dressed in his black, long sleeve shirt and jeans. He wished for something cleaner, but these would do until he got back to the air force base. He suspected his team would wait there for him. Hetty would blow a fuse. Sam, well, he'd lay into him. Nothing mattered right now. Vladimir was his and his alone.

G stepped out into the parking lot and moved to the back of the SUV.

"It's about time you showed up." Sam had parked his butt on the bumper.

G startled. "How in the…"

"I tagged the car and you."

"I should've figured that because you left me without so much as a fight."

"I made a comment."

"I ignored it." G sighed. "I guess this means you're coming with me."

"We're all coming with you." Sam signaled the rest of their team to come out of hiding.

"Come on, seriously, maybe you, but Kensi and Deeks too?"

"Yeah, we'll need backup to do this right."

G shooed Sam away from the tailgate. "Let's inspect the—"

"Did it while you were taking a shower. Weaponry ordered and assembled and ready to go."

Deeks and Kensi climbed into the backseat.

G strode toward the driver's side.

"Not happening," Sam said, pushing his partner aside. "You've gone as far rogue as you're gonna."

G shot him a look and got into the passenger's side.

"Bring the coordinates?" Sam asked, getting into the SUV and revving the engine.

G pulled out a slip of paper and keyed in the numbers into the onboard computer.

"Wait a minute, you said you got the weapons ready while I was in the shower."

"Yeah, I let myself into your room to make certain you were still there."

G shook his head.

"And I planted more bugs on your clothes just in case you decided to slip out the back way."

"Hetty put you up to this?"

"Affirmative."

"And here I was feeling sorry for the two of you."

"How kind of you." Sam smirked.


	23. Rogue Torture

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**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading.**

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**Rogue Torture**

**Chapter 23**

As they neared the coordinates on the GPS, G squirmed in his seat. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw his partner watching him.

"You okay?"

"Just peachy." It was a given his partner would know what he meant. G had used the phrase numerous times when he had gone rogue or thought about doing it or something bothered him.

"You gonna tell me what's going on?"

"I'm telling you now I'm going to go crazy. I'm going to go rogue again. I'm going to say something you don't want to hear."

"Like what are you saying here?"

"Kind of like how I acted down in the bunker in the corridor."

"Just as long as you don't shoot 'em up and ask questions later."

"I can't promise anything."

G glanced sideways at his partner and then straight out the front window.

A few miles down the road the on-board GPS system alerted them of their destination. Sam parked the vehicle at a distance, protecting the team from taking any undo fire. They climbed out of the SUV and grabbed their weapons out of the back.

"Do you need the walker?"

G shook his head. He strode side by side with his partner toward a clearing. They ducked behind low-lying brush, keeping back from the open area. Kensi and Deeks came around the other side of the clearing and held their positions. Sam signaled for everyone to move forward with caution.

Before following his partner, G held back, scanning the area around him and searching for any movement. Coming closer to the open area, G spotted a dark-clothed figure toward his right. He screamed at the man who was running toward an embankment. "I'm coming after you now! You're mine now! I'm going to torture you now!" G rushed forward with his weapon pointing at the man and firing at will. "You're mine now! I'm going to get you now!" He stopped near some bushes, lowered to a knee, and caught his breath. Heavy footfall came behind him. G straightened and faced his partner. "Man, I think I just lost it again."

"Stay with me. Let's get him." Sam ran out in front of his partner.

G followed close behind, keeping his weapon drawn and ready. He quickened his pace and came alongside his partner. "Man, I'm out of shape. I thought I could keep up with you," G said, breathless. "All I want to do is kill that bastard. I want to shoot him full of buckshot. I want to torture him like he tortured me."

"You and me both."

Sam and G hurried along the low-lying bushes, remaining hidden from Vladimír. The man was definitely acting like wolf. And they needed to act the same way, shadowing him and then flushing him out. They came to a gully and looked both ways before crossing it. No sign of the man they were hunting.

Kensi and Deeks followed their team members past the gully and over a knoll.

The team hunkered down between two knolls and scanned the area to their left and right, searching for Vladimír. The hilly terrain made it difficult to see well past their location, venturing out beyond their protective covering might get them killed.

Sam turned to his partner. "Don't ever do that again!"

"I told you I would. I told you it was going to happen again. Didn't I?"

"You need to let me handle this. You need to follow me. And follow my lead."

"You trying to say I'm not stable?"

"Yeah."

"I'll give you that."

Sam signaled for the team to follow him again. They edged out around both sides of the knoll with weapons drawn. Vladimír was nowhere in sight.

"Looks as if you spooked him. Maybe he split the scene."

"I can't imagine why he was spooked." G smirked. "Wait! I see him. Over there. By the embankment."

"Seriously? Where?"

G pointed to his hard left. "You can't see that guy over there by the embankment?"

"Okay, I think I see where you're talking about. Easy man, follow my directions. Follow my orders."

G chuckled.

"You think this is funny?"

"I'm not laughing at you, man. And I'm not laughing at the whole situation. I'm laughing at myself and how I went rogue again. I guess it's inevitable."

Sam signaled for the team to follow him. They edged around another knoll and lowered to the ground hiding themselves from their predator. "Maybe you should stay here."

"I'm not staying here. I'm going with you."

"Don't do anything rash."

"Can't help myself. When it comes to that bastard, I'm out of control. I'm just being honest with you. I can't control myself and my urges."

Sam led the team.

G hated it. _I am the leader._ _This is my job._ He hated his torture-born desires. G needed to get this man. If it was up to him, Vladimír wasn't going to live another day. G surged forward passing his partner and team. All he saw was Vladimír, and in his mind's eye the man was covered with blood and bullets. He kept moving forward, his gun trained in the perpetrator's direction. Sometimes rushing forward sometimes backing off, but never stopping, always moving toward his goal. He blocked out his team members and their voices. He blocked out Sam's voice and blocked out Sam's shouting at him. All he could think about was the end result. Torture and kill Vladimír. G refused to arrest him. He wanted him dead. No other outcome would satisfy him.

G darted in and out of the low-lying bushes until he reached another clearing. Vladimír stood in the center of it. G stepped into the open space. He was now face-to-face with his nemesis. Their weapons drawn, they stared each other down.

After a prolonged silence, G couldn't stand it any longer. "You're mine." He had spoken the words in a snarl. His voice surprised even him. "I've been waiting for this moment for the past nine months."

"So shoot me already."

G saw blood dripping from a wound in Vladimír's right shoulder. "I want to see you suffer. I want to draw it out real slow." G shot Vladimír in the right knee.

The man dropped his weapon and fell to the ground wailing and grabbing his knee. "You dirty bastard!"

G stepped forward and stood over his torturer. "You're going to suffer the pain I endured during all those months underground." He fired his weapon hitting the man's opposite foot.

Vladimír yelled and writhed around on the blood smeared dirt, grabbing at his left ankle.

"How does it feel to be tortured bit by bit?"

"I never shot you."

"You didn't have to. You tortured me. You hung me up and beat me with that damned baton and those other torture tools… I don't remember what they were, all I know is they hurt like hell and I couldn't stop it and I couldn't stop you. And all you wanted to know was where those weapons of whatever they were… And you didn't care about me. And you didn't care if it hurt me." G shot the Vladimír's right hand where it was holding his knee. Before his torturer said anything or screamed, G shot the Vladimír's left hand where it held left ankle. "How does it feel?"

"Stop it! Just stop it already. What do you want from me? You have me. I'm right here in front of you. You want me to apologize? You want me to—"

"Just shut up! Period. That's what I want. Never ask me another question! You have no right anymore. You don't own me. You _never_ owned me. Right now… I. _Own._ Every. Inch. Of. Your. Body. I longed for the day to be able to say that to you like you said it to me down in that torture chamber."

G reloaded his weapon and trained it on Vladimír's head.

Sam came alongside his partner.

Kensi and Deeks came behind Vladimír and cuffed him with zip ties.

Sam said with a soft tone, "You're done." He placed his hand on G's weapon and took it from him.

"I wasn't finished. Give me my gun back!" G's voice quavered in spite of trying to control it. "I need it. I need to finish this."

"You've done enough." Sam wrapped an arm around G's shoulders and guided him back to the SUV.


	24. Therapy

**Well, this is it! One more chapter after this and another story has ended. **

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**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.  
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**Therapy**

**Chapter 24**

When they reached the black SUV, G refused to get into the front seat. He leaned against the back passenger door and folded his arms.

Sam approached him. "Going rogue on me again?"

"Huh?"

"Get in."

"Nope."

"Come on, man, what's going on with you?"

"I think I need that man hug you promised earlier."

Sam took his partner into his arms and held him for a few minutes. He stepped back and immediately saw the wetness in G's eyes. "You seriously need to see Nate."

G looked away from his partner's scrutinizing eyes. "When I get back."

"No, now."

"What?" G brought his gaze back to his partner's chest, unwilling to look into his face.

"He's here on the air force base."

"Too soon."

"The sooner, the better."

"I'm…"

"You don't need to apologize for anything that happened out there."

G faced the door and opened it. In a haze he climbed into the front passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt. He stared out the front window.

Sam sat in the driver's seat. "I meant what I said." He started the engine and drove toward the air force base.

"What about Kensi and Deeks?"

"The FBI is picking them up along with Vladimír. ETA," Sam eyed the clock, "two minutes." He saw the SUV pulling up. "Make that zero. You thought I'd leave them here in the middle of this mountainous range? With a prisoner?"

"Well, no, I hoped not, but in my state… I missed your call to Hetty."

"They called her not me. My only responsibility is you and getting you back to the base in one piece."

"Good luck with that last goal." G smirked. He stared out the side window and said, "If you hadn't stopped me I don't know what I would've done to that man."

"The whole idea was to allow you to release your rage, but not permanently end him."

G faced his partner. "What?"

"You heard me."

"This was all planned?"

"As much as one can plan an ops with an enraged partner."

"I don't know what to say except, thank you."

"You're welcome, but I'm not the one to thank. Thank Nate when you see him. And of course, thank Director Vance."

"He's here in Colorado?"

"Yeah, he's here waiting to congratulate you."

_Yeah, right, more like he's here to slap the handcuffs on me and chain me to the nearest post for going rogue again._ G placed his focus back on the scenery around him. At least it calmed him, well, somewhat. Nothing soothed the inner turmoil which threatened to bubble upward again and take over his life, making him act with wayward behaviors. _Maybe I __am__ certifiable._

Sam pulled up to the security gate and presented an air force base guard their ID. A few minutes later, the woman returned their NCIS badges and opened the gate to allow them entrance onto the base. Sam drove toward a grassy area and stopped outside a building.

"This looks more like a golf course than an office building."

"Good observation. That's because it is. Let's go."

G shot him a look. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, we're gonna do this."

"You told me I needed to see Nate."

Sam exited the SUV and came around to his partner's door, opening it and standing back. "Need any help getting out?"

"I got this." G climbed out of the car and walked beside his partner into the pro shop. "You and I could use some different clothes." G followed him into the one story, dark teal building.

"Got you covered." At the desk, Sam presented their badges and two sets of golfing attire along with sets of clubs were given to them. "Follow me."

They dressed in their pants and shirts in dressing rooms at the back of the shop.

G exited a room first wearing dark teal pants and a matching shirt. "Okay, how did they know our sizes?"

"Talk to Hetty about that. She arranged this whole thing."

"She's going to play golf with us?"

Sam came out of the dressing room. "They're all playing with us."

"All?"

"Let's go check this out." Sam led the way with his golf bag on wheels in tow.

"What are we supposed to do with our scuzzy clothes?"

"The staff will take care of that."

G followed his partner out of the pro golf shop and stopped by an outside refreshment stand.

"What's your poison?" Sam asked.

"I think I've already taken it." G smirked. He asked for two bottles of water and downed half of one.

The man behind the counter offered him another one.

G tucked the two bottles inside his golf bag and finished off the first one.

"No one's judging you, man, seriously, we all understand." Sam selected two bottles of water.

"Doesn't mean I won't catch hell for my froward attitude on an ops."

"That's what I'm talking about man."

Before they rounded the corner of the building, Hetty approached them. "Well, if you're here that means everything worked out okay," Hetty said. "Congratulations Mr. Callen."

"What?" He edged past her, looking at a bench filled with two more members of the golf team.

"Mr. Callen let's play golf." Vance stood and walked over to the first tee with a matching red ball and tee in his hand.

Nate nodded his head. "Callen."

They were both dressed in the same dark teal clothes.

"You play golf?"

"On occasion and this is one of those rare times."

G sat next to the team psychologist. "Am I supposed to run everything by you while we play?"

"If you want. That's up to you."

"Am I missing something?"

Hetty sat beside him. "Only if you think you are Mr. Callen."

"I would've thought I'd be roasting on a spit by now."

"Mr. Callen, why on earth would you think that?" She winked at him.

"This some kind of joke because I think I'm missing the punch line."

"No joke Callen." Nate stood and walked toward the first tee.

Sam sat next to his partner. "It's simply a game of golf."

Hetty followed Nate.

"Simply? I've never seen Hetty play golf. And I didn't know Nate played. And Director Vance? There's obviously a whole other side to him I've never seen."

They both stood and strolled over to the tee. The rest of the team was still there.

"And Callen, you can call me Leon. No sense being formal for a game of golf."

"Okay sir… I mean Leon."

G observed Hetty's practice strokes. _Maybe she knew how to play golf._

Hetty took a swing and the ball swerved hard right. She yelled, "Fore!"

_Then again maybe not._ G chuckled to himself; so much for Hetty's threats of the complete annihilation of his team.

"I'm out of practice," Hetty said, motioning for the next person to take their turn.

G laughed out loud this time and walked up to the tee. He closed his eyes and took in some slow deep breaths. The breathing exercises Nate taught him. He berated himself for not using them earlier in the day and refocused his efforts on his steady inspirations and exhalations. Upon opening his eyes, he focused on the stroke he saw in his mind's eye. He surprised himself at the concentration he was able to muster after the stressful ops, and especially after going rogue not once but twice. With his number one wood, G swung at the ball and it streaked through the air, straighter than he had ever hit one.

"Well done Mr. Callen," Hetty said. "Looks as if I've got a worthy opponent."

"I've been practicing some new mental techniques."

"You'll have to show me which ones," she said. "Obviously the ones I chose failed to give me the desired outcome."


	25. Par For The Course

_**And this is it!**_

_**Thank you for coming along on another journey.**_

**Thank you for the reviews. Thank you for reading my story.**

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**Par For The Course**

**Chapter 25**

At the tenth tee off, G thankfully found a bench to rest his weary body. He sighed, releasing a long breath.

Sam sat next to him. "Need a golf cart?"

"Possibly."

"Hetty called one in for you."

"I'll have to thank her. Never thought I'd make it this far."

Nate drove up to Callen in a golf cart.

"I see you've _all_ got ulterior motives." G sat in the passenger's seat.

"Your partner informed me of your concerns," Nate said, after leaving the tenth tee off and driving toward the eleventh one.

G sighed. "I didn't play that hole."

"Neither did I."

"I think I see where this is going."

"I'm here if you need to talk."

G folded his arms and enjoyed the ride around the golf course. It was obvious that Nate had no intentions of playing any more golf. "Have you ever played before?"

"First time for an eighteen hole course."

"You weren't bad. Hetty was worse. And Leon, well, I won't mention him."

"Don't let Leon or Hetty hear you say that."

"I think I'm okay with what happened, but one thing Sam said bothered me."

"And that was?" Nate asked.

"He said I might be traumatically bonded to Volkov."

"You're referring to Stockholm Syndrome?"

"Yeah, you see… this is kind of hard to explain… even with the gun trained on his head I felt two ways about that man."

"And you might considering what he put you through and how you became reliant on him for your survival."

"So Stockholm Syndrome?"

"Yes."

"I think I need time to get over this," G said, releasing a pent up breath and relaxing his arms. "Part of me wanted to kill the bastard."

"And part of you wanted to save him?"

"Worse." G shook his head. "I don't know how to say this. It's part of what happened down there in those torture chambers of his."

"Take your time and remember your breathing."

G closed his eyes and spent a few minutes inhaling and exhaling until he was relaxed. "I'm not opening my eyes."

"Fine with me."

G grasped the frame of the golf cart to keep his balance. "After he tortured me, Volkov… damn." G turned away from Nate. "Stop the cart!" He leaped out of it before the team psychologist brought the cart to a complete stop. G ran over to a rough and vomited several times. "I can't."

Nate stood by his side. "Slow it down. Focus on your—"

"No!" G collapsed to his knees. "You don't… I can't… too soon to talk about this."

"That's what I'm talking about, Callen, slow everything down and take your time," Nate said. "It may take months to get to that place." He offered Callen a hand up and gave him his handkerchief.

"Oh thanks." G wiped his face and climbed back into the golf cart. "I don't know if I can ever talk about it." _At least not with Nate but maybe I can with Sam._

"Talk is cheap even in psychotherapy. Want to finish playing?"

"Yeah, that's what I need right now."

Nate drove back to where Leon, Hetty, and Sam were now standing, the thirteenth hole.

"Thanks again Nate." G stepped out of the golf cart and took his rolling golf bag out of the back.

"Everything go okay?" Sam asked.

G stuffed the dirty handkerchief into a zippered pocket on the golf bag. He took a couple of swigs of water. "For now I need to finish the rest of the holes."

"And then?"

"I don't know." G selected the number three wood and strode up to the tee off area. After a few practice swings, he addressed the ball and hit it. The teal ball flew through air and landed close to the putting green.

"Nice one partner." Sam patted him on the back and stepped up to the tee.

"Could you refrain from doing that?"

Sam faced him. "What?"

"I'm dealing with something…" G walked away with his partner.

"Wait a minute." Sam matched G's strides back to the golf cart. "Would you stop a minute?"

G flipped on his heels and waited for his partner to say something.

"Could you at least tell me—"

"It's why I hesitated long enough for you to grab the gun from me."

"Stockholm Syndrome, right?"

"Yeah, Nate agreed with you. I couldn't do it and I can't tell you why yet. Just the thought of it makes me ill."

"Understood. No hurry. And I'll try to keep my hands off you, if I remember."

"I needed that man hug earlier today."

"Okay, got you." Sam nodded. "Anything else?"

"Nope." G smirked. "Just had to say it. Go play the hole."

Sam walked back over to the tee. Without a practice swing he laid into the ball and it headed the same way his partner's had, straight to the putting green.

G strolled with his partner to their golf balls.

When they reached the well manicured lawn, G stopped and faced his partner. "Something about what that bastard did to me down in that hell hole bothers me."

"Yeah?" Sam removed a putting iron from his golf bag.

G had taken out a putting iron and crouched to study the lie of the hole. He straightened and eyed his partner.

"If it were me, a lot would be bothering me and not just for a short time afterwards," Sam said.

"Okay, I'd have to agree with you on that. Nate told me numerous times that anyone would have that type of reaction to being tortured like that."

"Agreed, but this goes beyond that, right?"

"Way beyond that." G focused on the ball and his putting iron. With a few practice strokes under his belt, he stepped up to his ball and gave it a harder stroke then he had first decided upon. The golf ball rolled toward the hole, circled it, and landed inside the cup.

"Nice."

"It goes uphill. Kind of like my life right now."

Sam followed his partner's choice to hit the ball harder. His golf ball traveled the same trajectory that his partner's had and entered the cup. "Thanks for the tip." He leaned over and picked up the two balls, handing his partner the teal-blue one.

They strolled toward the fourteenth tee.

G stopped midway. Sam joined him.

"Look, this is going to sound far out. It makes going rogue look sane."

"Everything you shared was over the top. Every way that man tortured you was beyond the normal human experience. Okay? So nothing you share is gonna shock me."

G rested under a huge fir tree, putting his back against it. "Maybe this would."

"Nope." Sam smirked.

"Tit for tat, is that it?"

"Not exactly. Go on."

G understood that Sam wanted to keep things light. He focused his eyes on the fourteenth tee. "He'd break me emotionally and then… hold me until I calmed down."

"Definitely Stockholm Syndrome." Sam leaned against the tree.

"I swear if I kept up with what I wanted to do with that bastard… if I pulled the trigger… damn… I would've killed my savior… I hate that word… hate it."

"Understood."

G pushed off of the tree trunk with both hands and strolled toward the tee.

Sam matched his partner's pace.

"Do me a favor and don't share this with anyone."

"You've got it."

"You first." G sat on a bench and waited for this partner to hit his golf ball.

Sam said, "You're up next."

"Where's Deeks and Kensi?"

"Do you really need to ask?"

"I guess not by the way they were acting in the backseat." G walked up to the tee and positioned his teal ball and his body and hands. He closed his eyes and imagined the ball sailing toward the hole. G opened his eyes and swung his number two wood. The ball hung in the air for longer than usual with this golf club and landed slightly in the rough to the right of the well manicured green.

"Nice one," Sam said.

They started to walk toward their balls.

"Wait up," Hetty said, breathless from rushing over to them. "You've got to tell me how to play better."

"Nope," G said. "I want to beat you at something. What's your score?"

"It's not as bad as Leon's."

"Which is?" Sam asked.

"Embarrassing."

G faced her and said, "Could you be more evasive?"

Sam chuckled.

Hetty pulled out the score card from the zippered pocket on her golf bag. She lowered her voice. "Thirty over par."

"Seriously, thirty? This is a par three course."

"Don't rub it in, Mr. Callen."

"And Leon's score?"

Director Vance came up to their group, huffing and slumping down on the bench. "My score?" He leaned over to catch his breath and then relaxed against the bench's oak back. "Before or after the last hole?"

"We scored two each on the thirteenth hole," G said.

"Two? How in blazes did you score that low?" Hetty asked.

"Practice." Sam eyed her.

"You haven't been able to practice, Mr. Callen."

"Mental practice," G said. "We'll wait right here until you two tee off."

"We're already teed off," Leon said, smirking and taking his turn first.

G stifled a snicker. "So, Leon, what was your score after the last hole?"

Before he hit the ball, their director faced them. "Forty over par." After no one said anything he refocused on hitting the ball.

G eyed his partner.

They both covered their mouths before the snickers got too loud.

Leon faced them again. "I can't concentrate with that snickering."

G couldn't resist the opportunity. "Well, that's par for the course."

At first their director's mouth dropped open and then he started laughing.

Hetty joined him.

Soon G and Sam laughed with them.

For the first time since his captivity, G realized his life was finally close to normal again.

* * *

_**The End**_


End file.
